Jakarta. “Borderlands”, the upcoming movie adaptation of the first-person shooter game of the same name, comes with a star-studded cast, but the final outcome is just alright. 

Directed by Eli Roth, “Borderlands” has a quite sluggish, boring start — as seen in a recent press screening. 

The story kicks off with outlaw Lilith (Cate Blanchett) embarking on a mission to find the missing daughter of the business titan (and the eventual big bad) Atlas (Edgar Ramirez). The girl supposedly holds the power to open a cave-like vault that holds lost treasure. 

The fun only starts when the six-person alliance takes shape, which includes ex-elite mercenary Roland (Kevin Hart), clumsy robot Claptrap (voiced by Jack Black), demolitionist, and the missing daughter Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt) as well as her musclebound Krieg (Florian Munteanu). Scientist Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis) also joins these unlikely heroes later in the movie as they fight evil bandits and alien monsters to protect the girl. 

“Borderlands” does not get too technical with the terms, meaning that those who have not played the game can still follow the storyline. Although the movie has great visual effects, the action sequences are just okay, but not enough to get your adrenaline pumped. And if you are an avid gamer, some scenes might feel familiar regardless of the titles you play. There will be times when you might think “if this were an actual game, this would definitely be the first boss fight. Or that part would be a cutscene.” 

“Borderlands” mainly relies on Claptrap for the humor department. The robot’s antics, coupled with Jack Black’s impressive voice acting, make Claptrap a good comic relief character. Blanchett suits the confident bounty hunter Lilith. Greenblatt does not get overshadowed despite acting with the veterans. Lilith and Tiny Tina’s mother-and-daughter-like chemistry is top-notch and surprisingly heartwarming — something that the audience might not expect out of such a movie.

But something feels like it is missing in “Borderlands”. The acting by the big names — and some heartwarming scenes — are not enough to make “Borderlands” memorable. The one-hour-and-a-half-long movie turns out to be your average sci-fi action comedy. And does “Borderlands” pique my curiosity into wanting to try out the game? Not really. 

“Borderlands” is scheduled for Indonesian release this Friday.

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Ms. Lauryn Hill and the Fugees have called off a U.S. tour that was set to begin Friday.

Concert dates listed on Ticketmaster were updated Tuesday to say they’d been canceled, while show listings on promoter Live Nation’s website informed ticket holders that they’d soon be refunded. Representatives for Hill and Live Nation didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Billed as the “Miseducation” anniversary tour, the road show was supposed to feature Hill and her Fugees bandmates Wyclef Jean and Pras Michel performing music from the Fugees’ seven-times-platinum 1996 album, “The Source,” and from Hill’s Grammy-winning 1998 solo debut, “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.” It was scheduled to kick off Friday in Tampa, Fla., and run through mid-September, with a Sept. 17 stop at the Hollywood Bowl, where Hill brought a 20th-anniversary tour based on “Miseducation” in 2018. The cancellation was reported earlier by Variety.

After not performing together for 15 years, the Fugees — known for expanding the role of melody and live instrumentation in hip-hop with hits like “Ready or Not” and their smash rendition of Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly With His Song” — announced a reunion tour in 2021 but played only a single date before canceling the tour as a result of what the group said were pandemic-related difficulties. Hill and the Fugees hit the road again in late 2023 only to end up pulling out of concert dates a second time, with Hill citing “serious vocal strain.”

Before she called off the 2023 tour, Hill made headlines with a performance at L.A.’s Crypto.com Arena, where she gave a viral six-minute speech about her reputation for starting shows late (“Y’all lucky I make it on this … stage every night,” she told the audience) and what she characterized as her mistreatment by the record industry.

Japanese director Nobuhiro Yamashita (“Linda Linda Linda”) was represented by no less than three features at Montreal’s Fantasia Fest this year, including anime “Ghost Cat Anzu” and high school seriocomedy “Swimming in a Sand Pool.” The shortest, most outwardly simple yet also possibly best of the lot might well be “Confession,” a manga adaptation in which two mountaineering refugees from a blizzard spend a long, discomfiting night in a cabin. The fact that one of them has just admitted to murder means that that particular type of crime could well recur before dawn arrives. 

More or less a single-setting two-hander, this thriller proves a small master class in eking maximum value from a premise one might assume too limited to sustain more than a short’s length. It’s a sharply honed, pleasurably nasty cat-and-mouse thriller that could attract remake interest overseas. 

A brief prologue informs us that Sayuri (Nao Honda, seen in flashbacks) disappeared on a college hiking-club trek, her body apparently never found. She’d formed an inseparable trio with now ex-boyfriend Asai (Toma Ikuta) and Korean exchange student Jiyong (Yang Ik-june); since then, the two men have annually climbed the same mountain in her memory. 

Sixteen years later, that tribute has taken a dire turn — Jiyong is injured in an apparent fall amidst freezing temperatures and heavy snowfall. Having no idea how far they remain from reaching shelter, he decides he’d rather give up, saying “I deserve to die.” He admits to his old friend that he himself had strangled Jiyong to death, out of frustrated desire and jealousy, leaving her body in the wilderness.

Moments later it turns out that the desired mountaineers’ cabin is, in fact, just out of sight, around the corner. Asai manages to successfully wrangle his wounded friend inside, then light a fire. Once they’ve realized no one is going to expire in the cold, however, the awkwardness of that prior confession begins to sink in. Soon Jiyong begins to regret his candor, and Asai to fear his friend can’t let him live with the incriminating knowledge they now share. First expressed as mutual mistrust, then escalating violence, their death struggle is further complicated by an occasional hallucinatory quality. Despite his bum leg, Jiyong keeps disappearing and re-appearing with such jump-scare suddenness, we begin to wonder if what we (and Asai) are seeing is real, supernatural, or a paranoid delusion. 

While one might question why a lodge at this frigid elevation would be so spacious, and thus hard to heat, that interior is complicated and expansive enough to give Yamashita with plenty of opportunity for spooky atmospherics. Likewise, it provides characters space for unpleasant hide-and-seek games that turn into frantic attempts at inflicting or or evading grievous bodily harm. 

The two actors ably sustain separate journeys into hysteria, ones stylized enough that we aren’t much bothered by niceties of credible psychology or action. “Confession” retains a knowing self-consciousness about itself as a pulp contrivance, even as it succeeds in milking the situation for plentiful tension, jolts and black humor. There could have been a bit more shock value eked from the fadeout revelation, but until then you can’t fault the director for missing any opportunity in his taut progress. 

Making first-rate contributions to elevate this grisly little tale are D.P. Shinya Kimura’s elegantly moody widescreen compositions, and an unexpectedly big symphonic score by Masa Takumi that surges between long stretches of queasy quiet.