Summary
- A Minecraft Movie mirrors mistakes of Super Mario Bros, from jarring music choices to over-reliance on references disguised as story elements.
- Jack Black’s standout performance in A Minecraft Movie adds a highlight, but the film suffers from inconsistent tone and uninspired musical performances.
- Despite grand ambitions, A Minecraft Movie’s desperate attempt to replicate the success of Super Mario Bros falls short with jarring tonal shifts and lackluster storytelling.
A Minecraft Movie has no less than six credited people responsible for the mangled mess of a story that it delivers. Between this and the fact that the movie has been in various states of development and production for the better part of the last decade, it’s apparent that the film was written and rewritten time and again. And A Minecraft Movie certainly feels that way, with its jarring tonal shifts and narrative cul-de-sacs.
However, out of all of this, one thing that becomes increasingly apparent throughout the movie is that the makers desperately wanted it to be a gargantuan blockbuster hit. In order to do this, they took some extensive notes from the highest-grossing video game movie of all time: 2023’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie. However, this wasn’t always to the movie’s benefit.
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Minecraft’s 80s Music Tracks Are Lifted Straight from Super Mario Bros.
On the surface, taking a few cues from a billion-dollar-making blockbuster behemoth makes perfect sense. Super Mario Bros. was an extremely lucrative film, and despite the tepid critical response, it resonated with widespread audiences. However, to say that Super Mario Bros. was as much of a creative success as it was a financial one would be an outright farce, given how compromised of an adaptation the film was. It struggled to find a coherent and compelling story amidst the decades of source material, which made it hard to strike a balance between appeasing hardcore fans and enticing general audiences.
One of the oddest choices made to this end in Super Mario Bros. was the often grating use of 80s pop songs as needle drops. It’s difficult to discern where this thought process came from, other than the most generalized connection that the first Mario video game was released in the middle of the 1980s. However, the franchise has never associated itself with the Americanized ideal of the 80s aesthetic before this, and has its own iconic music in the form of Koji Kondo’s integral musical score.
It seems the Super Mario Bros. filmmakers wanted to give general audiences music they would recognize and harbor some sense of nostalgia for, in the vein of other Chris Pratt-led films like Guardians of the Galaxy. But here, the song choices are unmotivated and feel jarring. Inexplicably, A Minecraft Movie steals this trick, but without any rationale as to why, considering the game was released in 2011. Furthermore, despite having iconic musician and composer Mark Mothersbaugh create a new score for this film, it frequently drowns out his original compositions in favor of uninspired 80s needle drops.
A Minecraft Movie Turns the Jack Black Content Up to Eleven
From one of the weakest elements of Super Mario Bros. to one of its strongest, Jack Black’s vocal performance as Bowser is a genuine highlight. He goes all-in on a gravelly, character-driven performance that manages to blend the more traditional takes on the character with his own distinct new verve. This is only clearer when comparing Black’s performance to several of his co-stars, such as Chris Pratt as Mario, whose work is far less articulate and informed. On top of the great performance, the talented actor/musician also delivers a stellar original song in-character in the middle of the movie with his go-for-broke piano ballad, “Peaches.”
Black’s performance was highly praised, and the song went viral. Thus, it’s no surprise that A Minecraft Movie, another video game adaptation featuring Jack Black in a prominent role, would attempt to mine the same levels of success. However, the results are far less inspiring.
Black’s performance as Steve is unhinged, with the actor delivering one of the most quintessentially Jack Black-ian performances of the last several decades. In reteaming with director Jared Hess (with whom he collaborated on Nacho Libre), it’s as if Black felt entirely unencumbered and was, in fact, encouraged to riff and improvise as much as possible. The result is a sporadic, all-over-the-place performance that has entertainment value in its own right, but fails to do anything beneficial for the film itself.
Even worse, A Minecraft Movie features a couple of musical performance bits from Black that also fall flat. The most disappointing is “Steve’s Lava Chicken,” which sees the film’s already wavering momentum skid to halt so that Jack Black can try and create another viral meme. It feels blatant, obvious, and kind of insulting.
Both Movies Mistake References for Story Elements
The worst lesson that A Minecraft Movie seems to have learned from The Super Mario Bros. Movie is what audiences want in their video game adaptations. Both films feature a slew of references to characters, locations, or elements of the video game, masquerading as actual story elements. The Super Mario Bros. Movie, in attempting to set up an interconnected universe of video game adaptations, speed-runs through many of the most famous moments from the character’s history. Everything from Mario’s conflict with Donkey Kong, to Luigi’s entrapment in a haunted mansion, to Mario Kart is run through fast, with precious little time to do any of it justice.
As a result, the film makes a lot of passing references to things that video game fans will recognize, but ruins the chances of them being adequately rendered cinematically. These pieces of the story from the video game could have made for compelling film entries in their own right, but now they’ve already been covered in a matter of minutes in this one film. The result is a lot of squandered potential for this franchise.
The makers of A Minecraft Movie apparently saw this and did not think beyond the fact that these references made people applaud on opening night — because they did the same thing. Huge chunks of A Minecraft Movie’s runtime are devoted to passing references to the video game. Jack Black’s character calls them all out by name, practically making a YouTube Easter Egg video within the confines of the movie. These are accompanied by several elongated moments of screentime so that the audience can assumedly clap. It’s egregious and cribbed directly from The Super Mario Bros. Movie playbook, and not in a good way.
