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If you thought the title of this review would mean that the critic would lambast Jared Hess’s adaptation of Mojang Studios’ Minecraft, which is still the best-selling video game of all time to this day, then think again. This critic left the IMAX cinema perplexed because, as much as the trailers and promotional material lean heavily on elements that hardcore game fans can latch onto, this isn’t A Minecraft Movie, as much as the title suggests. For better or worse, this is a Jared Hess film. Whether or not this is a feature or a bug is up to you to decide, and it will likely depend on your appreciation of Hess’s brand of sheer stupidity, notably if you liked Napoleon Dynamite or one of the great comedies of the 21st century, Nacho Libre.
Sadly, especially for Hess Aficionados™, Warner Bros. seemingly did not let the filmmaker cook all the way because the finished product seems to battle with its own stupidity. It never fully knows if it should dial it up or tone it down, resulting in an unevenly frustrating picture that’s never boring but neither entirely compelling nor genuinely funny. Truth be told, A Minecraft Movie needed to be one thousand percent stupider than the movie currently released in theatres to become a classic in the vein of something like The Lego Movie or Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, both titles this video-game adaptation is clearly taking inspiration from.
Steve and the Minecraft World
The Hess Sauce™ is a particular brand of ridiculous comedy, which is an art in its own right. You either love how pee-brained it can get or loathe how juvenile and agonizing the experience of sitting in a movie that continuously talks down at the audience to get a laugh is. Chances are, if you already despise Hess’s films, then you may not like A Minecraft Movie.
The movie immediately showcases how profoundly unintelligent it is by introducing the audience to Steve (Jack Black), inside a fully-synthetic environment dubbed “The Overworld,” where he builds his own environment with the aid of the Orb of Dominance (basically The Tesseract from The Avengers, and not the only similarity from Joss Whedon’s 2012 MCU film). The constant voiceover narration where he points at elements from the game, dances around CGI pandas, and Jack Black’s harder than he ever did shows how committed he is to the bit, just as he was in his previous collaboration with Hess.
The entire world Steve inhabits is completely fake. Director of Photography Enrique Chediak’s IMAX photography is so flat and unimaginative that one can clearly tell Black is dancing alongside the fakest possible pandas on the most obvious green screen imaginable, with shoddy lighting exposing the virtual environment in front of him, no depth of field making the Overworld feel lived in, and the sun not even reflecting the human characters properly. It’s as shoddy as Hollywood blockbuster cinematography gets and part of the problem as to why many moviegoers are shunning films altogether. They don’t look like movies anymore but rather “content” that only act as mere distractions as you fold your laundry or complete other daily chores.
A Minecraft Movie is Not Cinema
No movie is meant to be attentively watched anymore, which is why most moviegoers inadvertently making this a commercial success see it for the meme and the meme only. Anyone who analyzes it as a piece of high art is kidding themselves. Hess is not an artist; he possesses no formal knowledge of shot composition, and the writing of his jokes has always seemed terribly outdated, but no more than A Minecraft Movie, where the basis of its comedy is reliant on audiences understanding the (tired) reference the movie is plucking out of.
Yet, as terrible as the CGI may get in many places, it feels oddly part of the charm of Hess’s transposition of Minecraft to the screen, a world ruled by limitless creation. It has a textured quality highly reminiscent of Robert Rodriguez’s Spy Kids 3D: Game Over or The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl, wherein the director fully knows they’re working in an entirely digitized environment, but the actors are so convinced that the film will be special that they give their 110% regardless. In turn, this slowly convinces us that the world they inhabit is real or feels heightened enough to make us believe in the existence of piglins, villagers, and zombies, as improbable as any of it sounds.
The action moves surprisingly fast, despite the constant shrieking from Jason Momoa’s Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison and the overexpository line deliveries from Black’s Steve, who explains the Overworld’s mechanics as if he’s an NPC, even while breaking out in song to describe Steve’s Lava Chicken, with lyrics such as:
“STEVE’S LAVA CHICKEN, YEAH IT’S TASTY AS HELL
OOH, MAMACITA, NOW YOU’RE RINGIN’ THE BELL
CRISPY AND JUICY, NOW YOU’RE HAVIN’ A SNACK
OOH, SUPER SPICY, IT’S A LAVA ATTACK!!!!!”
The Overworld Journey
It’s all a farce from beginning to end. None of the characters who enter the Overworld evolve in any way, despite the telegraphed relationship between siblings Natalie (Emma Myers) and Henry (Sebastian Hansen), the apparent heart and soul of the movie that propel the story in motion. In Garrett’s shop, Henry accidentally activates the orb and teleports in the Overworld with his sister, Natalie, and real estate agent Dawn (Danielle Brooks).
The adventure wherein they have to stop the evil Malgosha (Rachel House) somehow reads as a journey of self-discovery and healing, especially regarding Natalie and Henry. Yet, Steve remains the same. Garrett remains the same. Dawn remains the same. There’s no emotional journey, and what the siblings needed to hear as they have the adventure of a lifetime didn’t necessarily need the Minecraft of it all to understand how much they need each other in the wake of crushing loss.
The “Side Quest”
The excuse of putting them all in the Overworld is for Hess to bathe in one lousy setpiece after the next, with varying degrees of quality, and insert a subplot where a villager named Nitwit (voiced by Matt Berry) accidentally enters the real world, and develops a romance with Vice Principal Marlene (Jennifer Coolidge), the most unnecessary B-storyline of any film released this year. However, it leads to the script’s singular best moment that could have salvaged such a movie if it leaned harder in moments like these that remind you that Jared Hess directed A Minecraft Movie. During a restaurant conversation between Marlene and the villager, a waitress comes to their table and asks, “Are you finished?” leading the vice principal to respond, “No, I think he’s Swedish.”
This single piece of dialogue caught the audience so off-guard that their only natural reaction to such a visceral, surprising moment is laughter. Befuddled laughter, but laughter nonetheless. And whenever A Minecraft Movie would bathe in the stupidest, most random possible joke, one that only Jared Hess could come up with, the film instantly shot up as a potential contender for the funniest in cinema history.
A Minecraft Movie‘s Attempts at Comedy
Yet, with each stroke of genius the movie’s five screenwriters—comprised of Chris Bowman, Hubbel Palmer, Neil Widener, Gavin James, and Chris Galletta—would surprisingly include in their production, there would be twenty horrendously written jokes that fell so flat you couldn’t even hear a fly buzz in your ear. Instead of reveling in the stupidity of such a concept, and of Jack Black doing the most Jack Black he’s ever Jack Black’d since the foundation of Jablinski Games, Hess and his screenwriters prefer to make elaborate gags on Big Chungus, by having a piglin general named Chungus (voiced by Hess), who eventually dies by taking fall damage, therefore solidifying his status as…a fallen chungus.
Such a gag can only titillate terminally online eight-year-olds who still think the Big Chungus meme is funny when it expired seven years ago. That’s how attuned to the times we live in the Minecraft script is, and it’s exactly the audience this film is targeting. However, these jokes and references to memes aren’t jokes or comedy and certainly don’t fall in the good graces of a parent who’s never heard of the video game but brought their kids to the theater so they can have a good time. The adult is torturing themselves, but not the extremely online child who has already entered the depths of the Internet and discovered things they probably shouldn’t, especially within the Minecraft sandbox.
Side Note
As someone who has played the video game in his childhood, I was feeling two emotions during its 100 minutes: surprised at how stupidly funny it got, which led me to fall for numerous jokes that caught me off-guard, but would sometimes feel intense dread as Black kept singing, Momoa kept shrieking, and the climax of this entire non-event is a goddamned beam that opens a portal in the sky, not to mention making Steve say:
“First, we mine.
Then, we craft.
Let’s Minecraft!”
Performances and Character Development (or Lack Thereof)
You may think I am kidding, but no, this is 2012 all over again. Credit where credit is due, however, at least Hess and Chediak keep the action semi-interesting and playful, thanks to the self-aware nature of both Black and Momoa’s performances as actors who know what kind of movie they are in and do not care. That is why Black is mostly funny (minus all the horrendous songs he has to sing), and Momoa takes his portrayal of Arthur Curry in Aquaman to the extreme. They could have absolutely phoned it in and shown their embarrassment in starring in such a production that seemingly devalues the visual art form of cinema, but they chose not to.
Conversely, the constant focus on Steve and Garrett detracts from the other character arcs, notably Dawn, with Brooks given nothing to do and falling to the wayside relatively quickly. She does get her moment to shine in the climax, which neatly wraps up a story with little to no purpose but to satisfy the needs of gamer kids who want their movies turned into memes. However, for the meme to be truly spectacular, it needed to embrace its stupidity much further than it did and entirely give up jokes that are references to things that people who don’t spend their entire lives on the Internet have heard of.
Final Thoughts on A Minecraft Movie
Yes, the bulk of the Minecraft fanbase spends lots of time on the internet, but that doesn’t mean you cannot make an adaptation with broad appeal and have to resign yourself to kowtowing to people who will only see your movie to make fun of it (as illustrated by the audience erupting in thunderous applause as Jack Black says “CHICKEN JOCKEY!”). If people will mock your movie, why not make A Minecraft Movie the stupidest motion picture of all time? I guarantee it would have been a masterpiece and Hess’s best comedy.
Alas, since we live in an era of commercially friendly, intellectual property-driven slop, this is sadly not the case. Although, it does appear more vibrant than the sea of sludgly movies we have been getting lately. It may be why the film will end up as one of the highest-grossing of the year…
2/5
A Minecraft Movie is now playing in theaters!
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