When is stalking a celebrity funny? The right answer is "never," but writer/director Jimmy Warden (who scripted Cocaine Bear) tries his damndest to convince us otherwise with Borderline, in which dangerous superfan Duerson (Ray Nicholson, also in this week’s Novocaine) breaks into the home of ’90s pop star Sofia (Samara Weaving) with the idea that the two will get married and live together forever.
The first time he tries getting into her home, he’s met by her bodyguard Bell (Eric Dane), who is almost killed by Duerson. Sofia manages to escape her stalker’s grasp, but a couple of years later, when Bell is finally fully recovered, he prepares to guard Sofia again just when Duerson manages to escape prison, collect a small group of nutso followers (Alba Baptista and Patrick Cox), and actually stage a wedding. Who will go down this time for daring to interfere in his plans?
The film also features Jimmie Falls (The Last Black Man in San Francisco) as Sofia’s current flame, a basketball player named Rhodes, who gets sucked into this madness but also does everything he can to protect Sofia, including go to lengths that few others would probably dare to as far as distracting Duerson from his intended target. The film doesn’t exactly go to great lengths to paint Sofia as a good person, but she’s certainly doesn’t deserve this level of torment in her life. Still, I never really found myself drawn into these people as characters or the situations they found themselves in. Duerson is a gross little pest with a big knife, and his associates are just there to cause chaos and meet Sofia.
There are a lot of shots of Nicholson staring directly into the camera and smiling big, which instantly transforms him into a younger version of his father, Jack, and that’s fun the first dozen times director Warden does it, but you have to have more than that to make us curious about your villain. Why do these people follow him? How is he so successful at breaking into or out of so many places? Give us a little something more about this guy other than he’s unstable. Clearly, he’s unstable, but how did he get to this point? Weaving’s pop star persona fares slightly better, and she does strongly resemble many singers of the era, but her reactions to having her life on the line seem too understated, and it’s rare that she convinced me she was in any real danger.
Borderline is mostly a fun mess of a movie that had the potential to be something better if the filmmaker had taken things a little more seriously, even the humor. The performances are decent, but the actors aren’t given anything substantial as a foundation, and most of the characters feel undercooked in this plot. There are worse ways to kill a couple hours as a fan of thrillers, but there are definitely better ones.
The film is now playing in Chicago at the Alamo Drafthouse Wrigleyville.
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