‘A Minecraft Movie’ Review: Jack Black Tries to Dig His Way Out of a Deeply Unimaginative Block-Buster About the Joy of Infinite Creativity

Jared Hess' mega-budget video game adaptation works best whenever you can tell that it was made by the director of "Napoleon Dynamite."

Considering that “A Minecraft Movie” seemed as though it might cause the end of Western civilization itself, I’m relieved to report that Warner Bros.’ bright, buoyant, block-busting video game adaptation merely coincides with it. That isn’t to say that it’s good, per se, or to suggest that I recommend paying money to sit through such a wantonly derivative corporate product about the sacred joy of creativity (and the soul-crushing evil of the profit motive!), but there’s some legitimate fun to be had in watching director Jared Hess and a small army of screenwriters try to excavate a kid-friendly adventure saga from the infinite sandbox of their source material.

Unsurprisingly — or, as someone with a fatal allergy to “Napoleon Dynamite,” very surprisingly — most of that fun stems from the moments when “The Minecraft Movie” actually feels like it was made by the guy behind “Napoleon Dynamite.” The vast majority of those moments are concentrated in the first act of the story, before the brunt of its human characters are sucked into the cubic dreamscape of the video game’s Overworld and steered through a paint-by-numbers plot so unashamedly mashed together from “The Lord of the Rings” and “The LEGO Movie” that WB might have to sue itself. 

It begins with a kid named Steve, who — like all 11-year-old boys — yearned to work in the mines. Alas, The Man said no to his dream of swinging a pickaxe all day within the bowels of a pitch-dark cave, and so poor Steve grew up to be the saddest doorknob salesman that Chuglass, Idaho had ever seen. Also, he grew up to be “Nacho Libre” star Jack Black (who’s amped up to such an unprecedented degree of Jack Blackness that it makes his work in “School of Rock” look like a Bressonian exercise in restraint by comparison), and there’s simply no use telling a Jack Black character not to rock. 

So back to the mines Steve goes, where a glowing orb spirits him away to a magical place in which absolutely everything is cube-shaped; it’s a place where our hero is free to mine his brains out, and to build anything that his imagination can… imagine. The only problem is that an army of zombies and skeletons crawl out of the ground every night, the days are only 20 minutes long, and Steve is soon taken prisoner by the pig lord Malgosha (voiced by Rachel House), an evil swine who’s determined to escape the hellish Nether region that she rules like a square-cut Saruman. 

Her goal: To destroy creative expression throughout the universe, and force everyone — in the Overworld, and beyond — to live in the same joyless hell that she does. Unaware that Republicans have already adopted that plan as their official platform, Malgosha seeks the power of the orb to bring her bacon-scented brand of destruction to the human realm, where Steve’s pet wolf has kept it secret, and kept it safe.

Enter: recently orphaned teenagers Natalie (a winsome Emma Myers) and her curly-haired younger brother Henry (an explicitly Frodo-coded Sebastian Hansen), who move to Chuglass in order to fulfill their late mother’s dying wish. Natalie lands a gig as the social media manager of the local potato chip company (a distressingly realistic plot detail that only one or two of the movie’s five credited writers seem to have been aware of), while Henry — a brainiac with his head in the clouds — tries to survive his first day at a new high school. 

Kids may not see what’s so funny about Jennifer Coolidge’s performance as a divorced principal who can’t stop hitting people with her Jeep Cherokee, but the “White Lotus” star is a perfect fit for Hess’ affectation-driven humor, and the opening scenes of “A Minecraft Movie” are sustained by the slivers of well-honed quirk that managed to survive the studio process. Ditto Jason Momoa’s high-key turn as Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison, a Billy Mitchell-esque video game champion who’s stuck in the late ’80s; the character seems like a marketing team memo come to life, but Momoa’s herculean cartoonishness rescues the role from the faint stink of feeling like it was written for Chris Pratt, and he embraces the aggro insecurity of it all in a way that would make Jon Heder proud. 

While Hess doesn’t have a screenplay credit here, there are stretches of this film where it truly feels like he was the sole creative voice (e.g. whenever Henry’s gym teacher is on screen), and though “A Minecraft Movie” doesn’t get around to its half-assed — or quarter-assed — message until long after the action has been subsumed by toyetic spectacle, the first act of this story manages to make good on the courage of the third act’s convictions. It’s only when Natalie, Henry, Garrett, and an animal-loving real estate agent named Dawn (Danielle Brooks) bumble into the Overworld that “A Minecraft Movie” betrays its uncanny resemblance to the Kool-Aid subplot of “The Studio,” and the film starts to feel like it’s wrestling its creative energy into submission rather than finding a way to set it free.

Once upon a time, the fact that “Minecraft” is a game without a story might have been seen as an opportunity to do something a little different and more bespoke with a beloved piece of video game IP. Alas, for reasons that remain unclear, Hollywood would rather follow in the footsteps of 2023’s “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” (a hyper-basic adaptation which grossed $1.3 billion) than in those of 1993’s “Super Mario Bros.” (an unhinged Ballardian nightmare that bombed at the box office, and was remembered by star Bob Hoskins as the one thing in his life he wished he could undo), and so the Overworld is flattened into a colorful backdrop for a painfully generic adventure, rather than used as a tool for unrestrained ingenuity. 

Fleet pacing, vivid colors, and a poppy Mark Mothersbaugh score do what they can to paper over the film’s prefab nature, but even kids — especially kids — will pick up on the disconnect between what they can make in “Minecraft” (anything they can imagine) and what Hess has made of “Minecraft” (nothing they haven’t seen before). Things unfold without any trace of surprise, as the gang links up with Steve and embarks on a spirited quest in search of the other MacGuffin thingy they need to get home or whatever. They fight the undead, they fly across a valley in order to escape from Malgosha’s war party, and, just when it seems like the film might finally ease up on the “Fellowship of the Ring” homage, they take refuge in a mountain pass that turns out to be teeming with monsters.

Hess is able to maintain a certain degree of irreverence throughout the film (there’s a bit towards the end involving Malgosha’s dagger that my five-year-old and I have been laughing about for days), but most of its personality is pushed to the margins as the action wears on. That trend is epitomized by the semi-amusing subplot in which one of the Overworld’s unibrowed Villagers wanders into reality and immediately collides with Coolidge, a subplot that “A Minecraft Movie” makes exactly zero attempt to weave into the rest of its story. It’s like the studio agreed to let Hess maintain a dash of absurdity on the side as a little treat, so long as it didn’t get in the way of the high-energy nothingness that he was hired to preserve at all costs. The bickering dynamic between Black and Momoa becomes the story’s driving force, with the rest of the cast left to roll their eyes at the wannabe alphas and/or jettisoned to their own subplots just to keep them out of the way (Myers and Brooks get the worst of both worlds). 

It’s a real credit to Black’s irrepressibly unique comic energy that “A Minecraft Movie” never feels quite as hypocritical as it should. Either disastrously ill-suited for its message about how money is the enemy of joy, or immaculately well-suited for its message about much harder it is to build things than it is to destroy them, Hess’ film can’t help but feel like its very existence is an affront to the creative freedom that has allowed “Minecraft” to become such a vital form of self-exploration for kids around the world (even Warner Bros.’ choice to call it “A Minecraft Movie” as opposed to “The Minecraft Movie” implies a spectrum of different concepts, despite the reality of a business that can only imagine this one). But Black — whatever his charms, and regardless of how well they’re deployed here — is a living testament to the idea that people can still thrive by staying true to their own expression. If not in this world, then perhaps in one of their own design. 

Grade: C

Warner Bros. will release “A Minecraft Movie” in theaters on Friday, April 4.

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