The latest IP to be mined into a Hollywood blockbuster is appropriately a video game that celebrates digging: A Minecraft Movie.
Like The Super Mario Bros Movie and Jumanji before it, A Minecraft Movie centers on four misfits who enter a mysterious portal that pulls them into a strange land, this time cubic, like Lego only on shrooms.
The Jared Hess-directed action-adventure artfully straddles the line between delighting preteen gamers and keeping their parents awake. It’s an often-bananas adaptation, with bizarre digressions into turquoise blouses and tater tot pizzas. It has Jennifer Coolidge being very Jennifer Coolidge. Need we say more?
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If you’ve never heard of Minecraft — or its denizens like Creepers, Piglins, Villagers and Endermen — you are in big trouble. Consult with the closest 10-year-old immediately. (I have one and he noticed a sweet nod to the late YouTuber Technoblade, an Easter egg of sorts.)
The movie is faithful to the world of the game, while adding some things — orbs and crystals — to aid the plot. But if you come in cold and spot pandas and folks punching through earth, you’ll likely side with one human character who says: “This place makes no sense.”
Our travelers — a sweet brother and sister (Emma Myers and Sebastian Eugene Hansen), their nutty real estate agent (Danielle Brooks) and a deeply dumb, washed-up pro video game player (Jason Momoa) — are guided by Jack Black, playing an expert crafter named Steve stranded in the world.
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If it does anything, A Minecraft Movie marks the comedic coming of age of Momoa, who has shown glimpses of his chops in the Aquaman and Fast X movies. But when he’s not on screen in this one, it leaves the movie slack, which is saying a lot when you have Black being his full-force, over-the-top Black.
“There’s no ‘i’ in ‘team’ but there are two ‘i’s in ‘winning,’” Momoa says as Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison, who is fond of fingerless gloves and a Barbie-pink leather jacket with a fringe. In another scene, he notes: “Paper doesn’t grow on trees.”
The screenplay written by Chris Bowman, Hubbel Palmer, Neil Widener, Gavin James and Chris Galletta is as loosey-goosey as you’d expect from five different voices, with a traditional Marvel-style battle at the end fueled by plenty of “Let’s do this!” declarations but with a surprisingly goofball first half.
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Like countless films before it, A Minecraft Movie is all about the quest to go home, which in this case means navigating zombies, skeletons shooting fire-tipped arrows and a place called The Nether, a perpetually dark hell where horrible creatures mine for gold. For some reason, the ruler there, a piglike witch, has glowing eyes and a British accent.
The writers make some America’s Got Talent jokes, Black has a few songs — including a bizarre Steve’s Lava Chicken — and we spend an inordinate of time focused on Momoa’s butt, but it all ends in a dance party. The movie has a Dark Crystal-meets-Transformers vibe, a too-subtle message about financial failure and something about friendship.
The filmmakers do have characters throw eggs — at these prices, is that smart? — but they don’t lean enough into the celebration of creativity this movie seemed to promise when it started.
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Hollywood’s embrace of gaming has been yielding hits such as HBO’s The Last of Us and Amazon Prime Video’s series adaptation of the Microsoft-owned Fallout. More adaptations are on the horizon this year: Until Dawn, Mortal Kombat 2 and Five Nights at Freddy’s 2.
As for A Minecraft Movie, the advice is this: Come for the Piglins, stay for Momoa, whom you will see spectacularly failing at being bilingual and jujutsu-ing opponents dressed like a member of Skid Row. It’s everything you ever needed.
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