A Minecraft Movie, Directed by Jared and Jerusha Hess, finally delivers the long awaited live action adaptation of the beloved video game: Minecraft. While full of references and decent visuals, unfortunately, this movie falls short of its potential as an adaptation and expansion of the Minecraft universe.
Starting with the positive, this movie does a fairly good job of adapting and revamping the visual language of the game itself. For those who don’t know, the Minecraft graphics consist exclusively of blocks and cube-based designs. The live action designs for this movie were initially very controversial, and divided a lot of the fanbase. However, in the context of the movie and the world that it builds, these designs work well and do a good job of immersing the audience into this new world.
This movie is also pretty funny. With Jared and Jerusha’s previous work directing films like Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre, they carry over a lot of the absurdist humor they’re known for in their work. While the humor can be cheesy, or somewhat cringey at points, this film has some genuinely funny moments. This is because it lets Jack Black and Jason Mamoa cut loose and just have fun as their respective characters. That being said, the film often relies a little too heavily on Jack Black’s silly line delivery, or ability to casually break out into song, rather than working to fully deliver a great movie for the fans.
Aside from Black and Mamoa, the rest of the performances in this movie are exceedingly underwhelming. The additional characters put in this movie just felt like filler plot devices and added basically nothing to the film itself. While it tried to have a heartfelt core following the story of a brother and sister, Henry and Natalie, this movie really fails to deliver any performance that evokes any emotion. This leaves the movie exposed at what it really is— another video game adaptation that was made in the interest of making money, rather than making something truly good.
If this film had leaned into its absurdity like Nacho Libre or Napoleon Dynamite did before it, it could’ve actually really worked. Instead, the movie has an identity crisis between action adventure, absurdist comedy, and heartfelt family movies. But without being able to successfully pull any of these things off fully, it ends up being a disappointment of a movie overall.
This movie and its marketing play into a common theme of recent big IP-based movies. It seems a majority of the marketing and reasoning to see this movie was simply to make fun of it. A Minecraft Movie definitely feels like this year’s attempt at being like Morbius or Madame Web— a film that was made almost purposefully bad in order to go viral. With the current trends and memes surrounding this movie (especially Jack Black’s character), it’s becoming increasingly clear that the secret motive behind this movie was to make it cringey, cheesy, and disappointing for the fans, becoming a large topic of discussion on the internet. Of course, this means that no matter how good it is, people will see it. This will result in it making a lot of money, and studios continuing with more films like it. It’s no surprise that as of recent years movies geared towards children and the younger generations have decreased in quality, and it’s because of movies like this, that lack heart or any rich storytelling, but instead are geared toward internet culture and being the butt of the joke. Unfortunately, as long as clips can be farmed from these movies, and the internet continues to talk about them, they will continue to be made by studios simply seeking a check.
In the end, I’d give this movie a 2/5 purely for Jack Black and Jason Mamoa alone. While it was poorly written, and, for the most part, poorly performed, whether or not you like this movie comes down to one simple thing: are you a fan of Jack Black? If you enjoy just watching Jack Black be himself on screen, with a bunch of Minecraft references thrown in your face, you’ll enjoy this movie. If that’s not for you, then I definitely wouldn’t see this movie. As someone who loves Jack Black, I did have fun watching this film, but there were way too many issues to overlook and an overwhelming sense of disappointment at yet another video game adaptation failure.
