Reviewing The Five (Mostly Bad) Movies I've Seen Since Easter

A Minecraft Movie (2025)

I saw this when I was home from Montreal for Easter with my high school friends, who seem to have all wanted to see this out of some combination of deep irony and morbid curiosity. I came in with rock-bottom expectations, and it was so much worse than I possibly could have imagined.

They’ve been talking about making a Minecraft movie for about as long as I can remember, and I think you can see it in the final product. There’s no interesting idea to play with the setting, no twist on what it means to play Minecraft, and the plot plays out entirely linearly and obviously from start to finish. Someone told the writers to make a Minecraft movie, and this was the best they could do. Simple as that.

This movie was directed by Jared Hess, the director of Napoleon Dynamite, and you can almost, kinda feel that influence, especially in the segments set in the real world. It’s a set of extremely idiosyncratic characters who don’t know how weird they are, portrayed by actors who play it entirely straight. The real world scenes are still bad, to be clear, but they feel the closest to being a real movie. You could, theoretically, imagine this working really well for the parts of the movie set in the Minecraft world: after all, the rules of the Minecraft game world are somewhat arbitrary and strange, but the game plays it completely straight and asks you to take it seriously. The tone could have worked.

Unfortunately, this tone stops immediately once we enter the Minecraft world, and the film is instantly drained of any lingering energy and creativity. This is the fault of two things: the visual design, and Jack Black.

I don’t know if this is a hot take or not, but Jack Black is awful in this movie. He totally kills the tone. Every other actor plays their bizarre characters super straight, but Black is constantly mugging to the camera when telling jokes, or delivering ridiculous lines that are dripping in sarcasm. It feels like he’s making fun of me for bothering to come see the movie in the first place.

The much-maligned visuals never, ever work. It’s actually kind of shocking: you’d think I’d be desensitized to it after 45 minutes, but I never was able to get into it and feel like any of the actors were in any place, just hovering around in front of green screens. There’s no sense of location or weight to anything at all.

The only reason to see this is if you’re a rowdy teenager looking to release a live chicken into the audience as a prank. Even then, the Cineplex I went to had security guards walk up near the screen for 30 seconds during the “Chicken Jockey” scene, so make sure you’re willing to get arrested for it.

Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire (2024)

A Minecraft Movie was trash in the way that eating expired food is trash. It’s bad for you, but you derive no pleasure from it. Godzilla X Kong is trash in the way that a Buffalo Chicken Poutine from Mel’s is trash. It’s horrible for you, but it goes down so easily.

I think I may be slowly becoming a Godzilla fan, primarily due to watching the absolutely excellent Godzilla Minus One in theatres in 2023. It became one of my favorite movies of the year, I recommend it to everyone I meet, and I’ve watched it several times since.

Ever since then, I’ve become sort of fascinated by the ways Godzilla, as a pop culture institution, shifts and changes to reflect the film standards and societal anxieties of his time. Godzilla Minus One is about the shame, regret, and fear felt by the people of Japan in the aftermath of the Second World War. It’s about how we forgive ourselves for the sin of surviving when so many around us do not.

Godzilla X Kong is about how cool it would be if Godzilla and King Kong (who has a new robot arm btw) had to team up in an anti-gravity fight against an army of evil monkeys.

This film is the fifth in what has now been dubbed the “Monsterverse”, and I think average cinema fans don’t realize how totally off the rails this franchise has gone. What started as a modern, realistic take Godzilla that played on the fears of climate change in the United States has now become a world where the Hollow Earth conspiracy is real, and an ancient uncontacted tribe of telepaths live at the center of the earth, manipulating large crystal towers to control gravity in an eternal battle against a tribe of giant monkeys waging an ancient war against Godzilla.

If you’re looking for a genuinely good movie, that’s not what this is, but unlike Minecraft, I think Godzilla X Kong knows exactly what it could be good at and exactly how it can deliver: big, expensive, ridiculous monster spectacle.

As is seemingly tradition with most kaiju movies, the human plotline is extremely boring. By this point in the franchise, the producers seem to understand that the draw of the movies is the big monsters, and the storyline which surrounds a secret government agency of kaiju trackers feels almost obligatory at this point, and the film clearly moves through it as fast as possible to get to the good stuff.

Kong is basically the main character of this movie. (Godzilla still gets lead billing, though. He must have a really good agent…) In fact, we can go 10+ minutes at a time without seeing any humans at all, at which point the film becomes an extremely expensive silent action movie. This part of the movie is actually remarkably fun and creative, and can express the intents and emotions of each monster shockingly well.

Highlights of the action include:

• Godzilla curled up in the Roman Colosseum sleeping like a cat
• King Kong using a baby chimpanzee as a club to hit larger adult chimpanzees
• The evil monkey leader having a magical crystal that he uses to control a pet ice dragon
• The aforementioned anti-gravity fight at the center of the Earth between Godzilla, Kong, and the evil monkey army

Look, this isn’t a great film. It’s a great movie. If you have a craving for junk food, it’s hard to go wrong with this.

Thunderbolts* (2025)

I think the reaction to Thunderbolts* has been somewhat backhanded. People say it’s good, but mostly in the context of how utterly dogshit the Marvel movies have gotten recently. McDonalds won’t blow you away unless you’ve been eating out of the compost bin for years.

Still, as someone who has been dragged to almost all of the new, terrible MCU films against his will, it’s honestly really refreshing to watch one of these where the visual effects don’t look horrible and the actors don’t visibly look like they long for death in every shot. It reminds me of what these movies felt like when they used to be consistently fine.

The strength of the Marvel movies used to be seeing extremely likeable actors develop charming characters you want to see bounce off each other and grow between movies, with serviceable plots and okay action. Recently, however, the characters have gotten much drearier, the plots have become more nonsensical, and the visual effects have gotten notably and dramatically worse (stretched by Marvel’s reliance on late-in-the-game reshoots and a lack of willingness to give VFX artists sufficient time).

Thunderbolts* doesn’t do anything revolutionary, it just reverses all of these. The movie is led by Florence Pugh and a cast of mostly new-ish actors who clearly aren’t burnt out on Marvel, and that difference alone makes it much easier to root for this cast of characters as they handle an interesting-enough villain with fine enough effects. This sounds like a veiled insult, but it’s legitimately refreshing to see from Marvel again.

I think I’ve grown out of Marvel. It was fun when I was a kid, but I’ve tapped out now. I’m ready for grown-up movie franchises, like Godzilla. But at the very least, this movie has given me hope that the kids of today who are growing up with this generation of movies will at least be getting decent films, if not amazing ones.

Max Payne (2008)

There’s nothing that me and my high school friends love more than a really, really bad movie, and my friend came to our recent hangout with a promise of trash and a single name: Max Payne. It did not disappoint. It feels too easy to call this movie bad, it’s closer to “improperly constructed”. Max Payne is a live action video game movie adaptation released in 2008, with all the horrible, horrible baggage that entails. It’s the worst movie on this list by a mile—MUCH worse than A Minecraft Movie.

It doesn’t have a plot so much as it has a collection of tropes awkwardly stapled together. Our main character, Max Payne himself (played by Mark Wahlberg) is a bad boy cop who doesn’t play by the rules, has best friends who tell him not to cause trouble, a beleaguered mentor figure who ends up betraying him, and even a fridged wife, murdered by the villains, whose death haunts him at all times in sepia-toned flashbacks to her holding their baby in bed. We’re playing the hits, folks!

The other characters are tropey, too, but none of them get much time to shine. This film seems to have about triple the characters that it needs to, and no one ever gets any time to make an impression. Characters are introduced and discarded so rapidly, I had no idea where we even were in the movie until the ending.

One of the things that ends up making this movie so jarring is that, while the movie plays things remarkably straight, it’s based on a game which is meant to be a satire of the neo-noir genre, which is why characters are named things like “Max Payne”. It’s hilarious to get to a dramatic scene which is supposed to be taken seriously, only for a police officer to ask if anyone has seen a “Mona Sax”.

Of course, there’s still normal incompetence to enjoy here. None of the actors here are good (Mark Wahlberg is particularly bad, but you can also enjoy poor performances from Mila Kunis and, inexplicably, Ludacris), the visuals are aggressively dark and blue to the point of it being impossible to see anything, which makes the action impossible to enjoy. The editing is consistently abysmal. Not a single scene starts or ends in the right place: each scene ends a second too late and starts a second too early.

What’s most hilarious is how the movie just… ends. Max Payne has fought through an entire office building of people to get to the top floor to shoot the man who murdered his wife and child. The villain tries to monologue, but Max shoots him, and the movie instantly ends. No resolution to the conspiracy the movie was building up, no moment where he comes to terms with his wife’s death or is forgiven for going rogue by the NYPD. It’s honestly comically unsatisfying.

Hitman (2007)

After finishing Max Payne, we realized we still had a few hours left to hang out. The next recommended movie on the streaming service we were using was Hitman, which is also a late 2000s film adaptation of an early 2000s video game series which got extremely poor reviews when it came out. We decided to keep the good times rolling and put it on too.

I think it was just because our standards were set so low after Max Payne, but we actually were pleasantly surprised by this movie. It was still bad, obviously, but there were good things about it, and I think it actually captured the spirit of the Hitman games quite well in some parts.

Hitman is a puzzle game disguised as a global assasination simulator where you need to figure out how you break into secure locations, take out a target, and escape without being caught. Hitman the movie is several scenes of the main character doing this, tied together by a nonsensical conspiracy plot and a truly terrible “romantic” arc meant to humanize our main character, assassin Agent 47.

First, the compliments: the action is good in a way that really does feel like the Hitman games. While we’re getting our exposition, we see Agent 47 setting up a series of seemingly disconnected devices or traps, and then during the action we can finally connect those dots in ways which are often cool and unexpected. The action is also really well shot most of the time, helped by good lighting and a brutal, sharp violence enabled by the film’s R-rating. I fully recommend watching a 5-minute clip of the fight scenes online.

Alright, compliments are over now. That was quick.

While our action scenes are genuinely fantastic, the overarching plot connecting the action scenes is really dumb. It relates to a global conspiracy to kill the Russian president and replace him with a body double, which is so poorly explained that I had to check the Wikipedia article for this movie to be totally clear on what the conspiracy actually was. It feels obligatory, like the movie is rushing through the exposition to get back to the action.

The “romance” which is meant to make Agent 47 go rogue also feels, honestly, really gross. The woman he “falls” for is a Russian sex worker who was traumatized by being abused by one of the villains, who Agent 47 needs to protect as evidence. The problem is that Agent 47, an assassin conditioned from birth to be ruthless, does this by kidnapping her, throwing her in the back of trunks, and drugging her over the course of the whole movie. When the movie decides they’ve fallen head over heels for each other, it caught me extremely off-guard because I never felt any connection between them. I never root for them to find comfort in each other—I root for her to get as far away from him as possible.

Like I said, this movie isn’t good, just better than Max Payne.