Knowing nothing about this film before I went in, I was surprised both at the vitriolic reviews I read and the low Rotten Tomatoes score. All I can attribute them to is disappointment manifested by fans of the game who expected something different – and sooner. Apparently it was envisioned as a bloody R rated romp, but Lionsgate shelved it during COVID, recut it completely to be PG friendly, and people who'd been waiting for it with baited breath were not at all happy.

I knew it had been a catastrophic financial flop, but without the baggage of all that eagerness and disappointment I found it a perfectly fine and fun enough – as long as your expectations are downgraded to the level you normally get from these corporate, over-CGI-ed trades in IP stock.

It's actually great fun to see a thespian as serious as Cate Blanchett slum it and have a great time talking to animated aliens and robots, shooting laser guns, running and diving around a desert and having effortless cool and swagger. A talent of her calibre hardly has to lift a finger to be effective here, and it's almost like her presence was intended to take the piss out of this whole moviemaking movement.

She plays Lilith, a gruff bounty hunter in a very atypical interstellar locality populated by ruffians, dark corners and a filthy rich and obviously corrupt corporate overseer (Atlas) with a private army backing him up.

Lilith is recruited to travel to a planet called Pandora (how unfortunate for the realm of sci-fi) and rescue a young woman named Tiny Tina (Ariana Gleenblatt), a girl full of innocence and sass. We've already seen her broken out of a high tech prison facility by a soldier, Roland (Kevin Hart), who also busts out Krieg (Florian Munteanu) a huge, hulking criminal from a class of murderous beings called Psychos.

Lilith accepts the mission because of some plot contrivance I couldn't remember, even though she herself is from the hellhole of Pandora and vowed never to return. But when she lands and tracks Tina down with the help of a comic sidekick robot, Claptrap (Jack Black), preprogrammed and stashed in her ship, Tina has gone native, living in the wastelands with Krieg and Roland and glad to be away from her father, who she explains after a pitched battle was actually her jailer.

After learning the truth that Tina's actually a genetically created being that's worth a fortune to the Atlas corporation, Lilith's conscience gets the better of her and she reluctantly agrees to protect the the girl along with with Roland, Krieg, Claptrap and a Pandora native who knew Lilith as a young girl and knows more about her destiny than she realises, Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis) and fight back against Wayland Yutani... or whatever they're called.

It's all got to do with an ancient vault full of weapons somewhere on Pandora, Atlas' ambitions for galactic domination, and the same team of ragtag heroes all as distinct from each other as they are reluctant to be there we've seen routinely since the days of The Avengers.

As well as being a perfectly adequate piece of entertainment that distracts you from your life for 90 minutes, I was surprised how many recognisable names were in such a supposedly terrible movie that flopped so completely. But the writing was on the walls – there were just as many recognisable talents behind the scenes that dropped out, disavowed or disembowelled the whole thing over the years it was made, with Tim Miller apparently responsible for castrating it with reshoots after credited director Eli Roth had finished and left and original writer Craig Mazin taking his name off it.