‘A Minecraft Movie’ Review – The Building Blocks For The Coming Era Of Slop
So this is it? This is how Warner Bros. beats Disney and Snow White, and ekes out their first billion of 2025? With this mindless copy-paste slop that has the Minecraft name attached to it? Okay, then, I can tell where this is going. I wonder if I was too harsh on Mickey 17 and Better Man.
In A Minecraft Movie, an actual mine is guarded by a toothless old madman. Inside is a portal to a fantastical world not like our own – The Overworld. This portal is found and crossed by the determined Steve (Jack Black), who wants more out of life than selling door knobs (seriously). He wants to create whatever his mind can come up with and have adventures with his square wolfdog Dennis.
However, not everything about Overworld is a magical dream come true. Beyond it is a hellish landscape called The Nether, populated by barbaric pig creatures ruled by their sinister queen (I guess), Malgosha (Rachel House). She is after the magical MacGuffin Steve possesses, the Orb of Dominance, which, combined with the Earth Crystal, provides control of the Overworld’s realms and access to our reality.
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Dennis scrambles back to Earth to put it under Steve’s bed for safekeeping, leaving his master and best friend behind to be Malgosha’s prisoner. Years pass, and the Cosmic Cube ends up in the hands of old-school gamer Garrett Garrison (Jason Momoa) after an estate sale. Garrett is a champion arcade competitor who can’t move on from his 80s glory days, and dresses like it. He’s also going broke, so he needs a get-rich scheme and fast.
There’s also a brother-sister duo moving to the small Idaho town/potato chip hub where everyone’s fate converges. They are working Girl Natalie (Wednesday‘s Emma Myers) and dorky juvenile, Henry (Sebastian Hansen), who’s somehow a high school student. Long story short, Henry conducts a science experiment on a dare that goes wrong. He damages the chip factory, costs sis her job, befriends Garrett, explores the mine, and goes through the portal first to where the adventures can begin.
But where should I begin? I know I’m not the target audience. I don’t play Minecraft, though that shouldn’t matter. There should be more to sink my teeth into than boilerplate web-junk humor. If Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite) and his crack team of half a dozen writers were relying on that to carry the festivities, they miscalculated. Not much of their movie is all that funny.
I can count on one hand the number of times I laughed. The two most notable gags were when the kid’s science experiment destroys the town mascot and a Naked Gun-tinged scene involving a series of knives. Other than that, I sat bored, unamused, and somewhat confused. I had no chickens or kids throwing eggs to break the tension.
Jack Black’s routine is dated but still entertaining. However, I wouldn’t call him the main character. He’s more like an avatar for certain audience members, and a box to check because Steve has to be in this. Jason Momoa tries his hardest, but his performance barely rises above cringeworthy. He has the closest thing approaching an arc, but the loser in denial is a played-out trope, and when he plays opposite Black, their pairing is one long veiled gay joke.
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Jennifer Coolidge, who is hardly in the film, doesn’t add much either. Her act is like the Geico Cavemen; it works better in short-form content, commercials, etc. Given moments in a feature, she’s not very funny and could be cut entirely for the sake of time and coherence, what there is of it. Things happen in a disorderly fashion just so the plot can move along, and people enter and leave the picture randomly, and it’s not just Coolidge.
Danielle Brooks from Peacemaker is also in A Minecraft Movie and usually shows up alongside Emma Myers, who is supposed to play an integral character, but has almost nothing to do. Neither of them contributes much of note, except conversational interludes in which zombies get beaten up to kill time.
In all, this film is less a smattering of events and people in search of a story, and more the result of several writers with too many leftover ideas thrown together, hoping they will stick evenly enough to entertain. Sorry, but I wasn’t, and I pined for movies that executed Minecraft’s premise better. Both Trons did it better, and honestly, so did Mario Bros… I mean the live-action 1993 one.
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A Minecraft Movie
PROS
- The 'Superman' trailer ahead of the movie
- Jack Black, in small doses
CONS
- Writing which was actually by committee
- Wasted cast
- Derivative story that in the end was incoherent and pointless
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