Comedian Kevin Hart will soon take on action hero duties as the character, Roland, in director Eli Roth's upcoming Borderlands adaptation, and it sounds like the funny man took the role very seriously, even training with the Navy SEALS. Hart has been discussing his intense preparation for the character in the video game flick, revealing that it was Roth who told him to be action hero-ready in order to win the role in the first place.

"He said, 'Kevin, if you tell me that you can show up prepared and that you want to come in and knock this out, then you're my guy.' So I went, I did some training with some Navy SEALS, I got real good with weapons, I got real good with my hand-to-hand combat. And the experience here in Budapest filming Borderlands has been unreal. Cate Blanchett, Jamie Lee Curtis, myself, Flo [Munteanu], Ariana [Greenblatt]... I mean, our cast is unreal."

Usually hired as the comedic sidekick, seeing Kevin Hart display proficiency in firearms and fist fights should prove to be an exciting experience the audience, as making the pic was for Hart, himself. For the first time, fans will see Hart on unfamiliar ground, though there will no doubt still be lots of room left for quips and high-pitched squeals...

With Roth at the helm, working from a screenplay written by Roth and Craig Mazin, and based on the video game series of the same name developed by Gearbox Software, the big screen Borderlands adaptation has amassed a hugely impressive cast, particularly for a video game movie, with the likes of Cate Blanchett, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jack Black, Ariana Greenblatt, Florian Munteanu, Haley Bennett, and Édgar Ramírez all signed on to the project.

Roth is well known for his time spent directing horror movies, including such gore-fest outings as Hostel and The Green Inferno, but Kevin Hart has assured fans of the video game that the filmmaker is the right man for the job. So confident in Roth's abilities is Hart that, should the movie play well with audiences, he fully expects Borderlands to spawn several sequels.

"He truly is knocking this movie out the park. And I can say visually, it's like nothing you've ever seen. Somehow I find myself in these spaces where you get a part of these IPs that are hitting the big screen and have the potential to become so much more. ... Borderlands, nobody knows what to expect, but if this thing comes and it smacks people correctly, you could be looking at Borderlands 2, Borderlands 3. It's that good."

Borderlands follows Lilith (Cate Blanchett), an infamous outlaw with a mysterious past, who reluctantly returns to her home planet of Pandora to find the missing daughter of the universe's most powerful S.O.B., Atlas (Ramirez). Lilith forms an alliance with an unexpected team - Roland (Kevin Hart), a former elite mercenary, now desperate for redemption; Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), a feral pre-teen demolitionist; Krieg (Florian Munteanu), Tina's musclebound, rhetorically challenged protector; Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), the scientist with a tenuous grip on sanity; and Claptrap (Jack Black), a persistently wiseass robot.

These unlikely heroes must battle alien monsters and dangerous bandits to find and protect the missing girl, who may hold the key to unimaginable power. The fate of the universe could be in their hands - but they'll be fighting for something more: each other. This comes to us from Collider.