A Minecraft Movie

Steve, a struggling salesman, fulfills a lifelong dream of working in a mine when he breaks into the local mine and begins looking for treasure.  He finds a curious cube and casing, called The Orb of Dominance, which when combined open a portal to another reality – one in which all the materials of life are cube shaped, and anyone with creativity can craft.  This Overworld grants him a new life where he is free to craft and express himself, without any cares or worries – aside from the legions of monsters who prowl during the night.  But when he discovers another portal, which leads to the lava and rock bleakness of The Nether, he is captured by the gold obsessed piglin leader Malgosha, who seeks the Orb to allow her and her army to destroy all joy in the Overworld.   The Orb is hidden away in our realm, until it is uncovered by a 1980s video game champion, Garrett Garrison, who accidentally activates it and traps himself and siblings Henry and Natalie, along with their real estate agent Dawn, in the Overworld.   Can this unlikely band of heroes save all the realms from Malgosha’s wrath, and more importantly, will anyone care?

So here we have A Minecraft Movie, another video game to film adaptation to join the plethora of wonderful movies drawn from our favourite games.  We all know how much fun films like Sonic, or Mario are, or Mortal Kombat.  However for every one of those films there is a Max Payne, Bloodrayne, or, well, Mortal Kombat Annhilation to offset them.  Minecraft Movie joins that legion of bad video game movies which, whilst at least being faithful to elements of the game itself, fails entirely as a story, or comedy.

The problems here are many.  The film begins with Jack Black playing Jack Black playing Steve giving us an exposition dump monologue of his life so far, which I guess is to try to bring non-fans of the game up to speed with the basics, but as it continued I started to feel that non game fans would have simply zoned out half way through that opening.  We are thrust into the admittedly vibrant and CGI world of the Overworld – which I admit I had no issue with the look and feel of, unlike many other fans of the game who seemingly wanted the very pixelated original graphics – but whilst the digital world is slick in presentation, it suffers when the human element is introduced as real life character simply look like they don’t fit.  The cast of characters are all very basic in concept, and the cast do nothing to give them anything to really make you care for them – with the exception of Emma Myers as Natalie, who seems to be in a completely different film than the cartoon-like caricatures of Garrett (Jason Momoa) and Steve (Jack Black as Jack Black).  Also I really have to question why Danielle Brooks’ real estate agent seems to be a point of contact for Natalie and her brother in emergencies – are real estate agents really that involved in the lives of their clients?

By the mid-point of the film, I found I simply didn’t care for anyone or anything playing out in the main story (and I use the word story in the loosest sense of the word), and was longing for the film to switch back to the antics of Jennifer Coolidge in the real world going on a date with a village who accidentally stumbled through the portal.  Those sequences amount to mere minutes of the run-time, but were the only ones to elicit any laughs, or have any emotional charm to them, before the film switches back to a barrage of nonsense, with most of it coming from Jack Black.

Therein lies the biggest problem here – Jack Black playing Jack Black playing Jack Black playing Steve.  If you think you’ve seen Jack Black be over-the-top eccentric before in films such as Pick of Destiny, well hold onto your hats as he goes full Jack Black here, and boy does it get tired early!  It does make you wonder if he actually had a script to work from, or did they just let him loose and work around it (which given he was initially only supposed to voice a pig for the film, that does seem likely), and his exaggerated mannerisms and voice patterns hold no charm.  Momoa also seems to suffer from similar allowance to exaggerate his character’s mannerisms – watching him erratically play an arcade cabinet game, or his flamboyant gesturing seem like he took the idea of his Fast and Furious character and dialed it up to 11.   Because of the overblown nature of these two leads, the potential for any emotional depth from the Natalie and Henry siblings is squandered – why put some genuine care into things when Jack Black could simply jiggle around waving his arms?

A Minecraft Movie is everything wrong with video-game movies, and the kind of product that makes non-gamers look at us gaming folk like we are morons.  A chore of a film to sit through, even as a fan of the game.  Minecraft as a game allows for amazing creativity within the setting – it’s such a shame that the film opted for the generic and formulaic approach as opposed to being as creative as say Lego Movie was with their IP.