'A Minecraft Movie' review: Adventure comedy has an ace up its Steve

Warner Bros. Pictures

Okay, guys, let's block some busters at our nearest cinema because we have A Minecraft Movie threatening everybody's peace and sanity. Based on the video game 'Minecraft', this adventure comedy takes you through a portal into a world where your imagination is the only limit. First we meet Steve (Jack Black) who has found mystical items, which helped him to transport to Overworld, a fantastical realm where everything is made of cubes. One of those items, an orb, is pursued by Malgosha (voiced by Rachel House, physically performed by Allan Henry), an evil piglin queen who'd use it to rule Overworld. Steve, in his wisdom, decides to hide the items in the real world.

Elsewhere, two orphaned siblings, middle schooler Henry (Sebastian Hansen) and his teenage sister and guardian Natalie (Emma Myers), move to a small town called Chuglass where they meet real estate agent and mobile zoo owner Dawn (Danielle Brooks) as well as Garrett (Jason Momoa), a video game store owner and washed-up game champion who's still stuck in his glory days. What occurs is that Henry and Garrett discover the aforementioned mystical items and the dynamic quartet go through the portal and enter Overworld. There, they meet Steve who explains the realm's rules. All of them team up to fight back against Malgosha and her army, all while trying to find a way back into the real world.

Low expectations have never hurt anyone and you could say that they were in the nether world for this specific movie, lowered further during the opening credits, which showed five screenwriters (Chris Bowman, Chris Galletta, Gavin James, Hubbel Palmer and Neil Widener) and three story credits (Allison Schroeder, Bowman and Palmer) to be responsible for the screenplay. As it turns out, the word "story" has perhaps become a loose term because A Minecraft Movie's story is sloppily put together with gum, tape, thoughts and prayers in order to resemble something that can look like a motion picture. It is undoubtedly the weakest link as it not just a worse, watered-down rehash of hundreds of other adventure films, but it is also utterly incomprehensible because it keeps dropping every single emotional or thematic thread it introduces for what look to be random spurts of fan service and references to the game.

Admittedly, those things don't mean much to someone like yours truly who—despite being somewhat familiar with the game—considers it desperate and finds the aesthetic extremely off-putting. Therefore, there's just too much noise to ignore when the want for belonging that initially drives these characters falls by the wayside, the plot developments are a complete mess and the visual style is pretty much an eyesore. Production designer Grant Major and his team together with VFX artists (supervised by Dan Lemmon) do some fine work to create unusual, angular sets and creatures that inhabit Overworld, but more often than not, their work is diluted by the realisation that you're watching actors doing alternative takes in front of a blue screen, with dull staging and lighting provided by director Jared Hess (who also voices general Chungus) and cinematographer Enrique Chediak respectively.

The movie's shtick is that exact thing: something unimpressive is always swallowing up the good parts. It's honestly disappointing that the film is such a dull, uninventive adventure (that in itself is sad because anything should be possible in this world) when it's actually very successful as a slapstick comedy, mainly for kids but also for adults. More than half of the jokes (not those presumed references full of brainrot) are formed well and their laugh factor just depends on your own sense of humour, whilst the physical comedy is easily the movie's strongest asset. This is an outrageous scenario taking place in an outrageous realm and Hess, the writers and cast take full advantage of that in terms of the humour.

The humour is in fact so successful—and earnestly cringeworthy—that even a B-plot featuring Jennifer Coolidge's character, vice principal Marlene, going on a date with a villager named Nitwit* who escaped Overworld and entered the real world through the same portal earns proper laughs due to great comedic timing and Coolidge's scene-stealing line deliveries. Oftentimes in movies, this type of side quest comes up as a negative and pointless distraction, but here it is a genuine delight and is a welcome distraction from mundane CG chaos that is going on in Overworld.

Coolidge is the most consistent entertainer here, but most of the material rests on Black and Momoa's shoulders and both of them make excellent, big comedic choices throughout, too. Black* is sadly tasked with providing three minutes of exposition during the opening and also whenever one of the other characters asks a version of "What the hell is that?!", which happens about 270 times during the 100-minute runtime. This gets tiresome real fast and is one of the war crimes that the script commits along with poorly written characters and motivations.

(*On a side note, when I was disassociating during Exposition Dump: The 69th Reckoning, I was thinking of the only person who could spruce up this god-awful dialogue and you can imagine my sense of joy during the mid-credits scene when said person ends up voicing Nitwit, and you can also imagine my sorrow when learning about the original casting preferences)

Considering how this all turned out, it has to be seen as a missed opportunity that the movie never gives you an idea of how stimulating and exciting it can be to create something fun out of nothing like you could theoretically inside this fantastical world. That could be done via learning to do intricate crafting or goofing around in a group in a way that seems free-flowing, creating stupid inside jokes or feeling like these people actually want to interact with each other instead of bickering like idiots. Instead, we're stuck watching Steve dumping exposition about his skills and experiences, as well as sitting through two car commercials; it is also a war crime to give Coolidge those moments when she's carrying your project during rough patches. It also underlines the icky commercialisation that tends to overshadow the human effort that the actors are giving.

Going back to those actors, Brooks is carrying a burden of being the main person screaming "What?!" constantly while Hansen is equally so-so in his outing. Myers is the least compelling presence in the cast, but it's not entirely the actor's fault since Natalie is probably the best example of those poorly written characters; there's just nothing interesting going on there, especially when the script tries to create a rift between her and Henry with awkwardly constructed scenes before abandoning that storyline altogether for some odd reason when the formula tells the filmmakers to move on to CG chaos instead.

Calling this a good movie would be blasphemy seeing how unimaginative and confused it is, but it's not a totally dreadful time either, like one might fear, because it does earn some chuckles. You simply love to see that the cast are committing to the bit, which helps to smooth out bumps every now and then, those bumps originating from a lack of curiosity, lack of audacity and lack of whim. There's not enough to mine here in order to feed your brain, but a few laughs are always appreciated nonetheless.

Smileys: Humour, Jennifer Coolidge

Frowneys: Story, originality, characterisation

It Dawned on them that they were in fact seeing an alpaca.

2.0/5

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