A Minecraft Movie
Jack Black, Jason Momoa, and Sebastian Hansen star in A MINECRAFT MOVIE. (Photo: Warner Bros.)
Who are the blockheads who thought A Minecraft Movie was a good idea? There are no winners in this hyperactive reimagining of the pioneering sandbox-style video game, in which Hollywood formula is an enemy too mighty for our heroes to overcome.
The film features some imaginative world-building, as you’d expect given the source material, combined with a freewheeling narrative approach that might have worked if not for ditching its sly self-deprecation for incoherent effects-heavy chaos.
Mixing live action and animation, the result feels confused about what kind of movie it wants to be or who it’s targeting.
After a prologue that awkwardly summarizes the ground rules of the game, the film segues into a story set (kind of) in the real world. That’s where pumped-up Idaho retro arcade champion Garrett (Jason Momoa) stumbles upon a mysterious orb and crystal at a storage auction.
He’s not sure what to make of it until a nerdy teenager (Sebastian Hansen) and his precocious older sister (Emma Myers) visit Garrett’s fledgling store. They unlock the power of the strange trinkets, which transport them via a portal to the Overworld.
Entrenched in the game and all of its cubic contents, they run into Steve (Jack Black), who hid the orb and crystal years ago to keep them from falling into evil hands. In obnoxious fashion, Steve explains to the newcomers both the sense of wonder and inherent dangers around them, and what they’ll need to build in order to make it back home.
As directed by Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite), it’s part adaptation and part lampoon, with the former providing the visual playground and the latter generating some laughs mostly via random non sequiturs. But the two objectives seem at odds with one another, and too many of the broad gags miss the mark.
The constant mugging competition between Black and Momoa quickly becomes tiresome. Hansen (Just Mercy) is subdued by comparison and thus the most appealing character by default. Kids might identify with the adventurous youngster and his mischievous curiosity.
A Minecraft Movie becomes a relentless parade of over-the-top quirks presumably intended to fill every frame with as much mayhem as possible, thereby catering to moviegoers with short attention spans — or perhaps those who agree that watching the game on a big screen isn’t as fun as playing it on a small one.
Rated PG, 101 minutes.