“A Minecraft Movie” could have used more craft.
A Minecraft Movie is not a movie. Rather, it’s a loose conglomerate of several disparate elements, some creatively driven and some financially driven, that just never coalesce into anything with even the vaguest hint of coherence or clarity to it. A Minecraft Movie is simultaneously an extended bit of marketing for the pre-existing video game upon which it is based, a parody of the very idea of making a Minecraft movie, a kitschy ‘80s-indebted fantasy film, an earnest attempt at selling Minecraft as a net good for humanity, and a multi-million dollar film whose moment-to-moment plot was seemingly dictated by whatever riffing its cast happened to on the day when they were standing in front of a green screen. If that all sounds wildly atonal to try and fit into a single film, that’s because it is. On top of everything, A Minecraft Movie doesn’t do any of these ideas particularly well, squandering the potential of each of them in distinctly different yet equally foul fashion. The end result just feels like watching a creative work that is compromised in every conceivable way.
Directed by Jared Hess (of Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre fame) and written by an outright cavalcade of credited screenwriters, A Minecraft Movie is at its strongest in the first act of the film. While the film gets off to an atrocious start, with a Jack Black-narrated prologue that feels like it throws an entire story’s worth of pre-emptive material at such a breakneck pace and with such post-ironic irreverence that literally none of it lands with anything other than a nauseating thud, things improve greatly from there. In introducing the rest of the human characters (as played by the likes of Jason Momoa, Emma Myers, Danielle Brooks, and Sebastian Eugene Hansen), the film settles into what will unfortunately be the firmest groove it will find for the whole of its runtime.
Hess feels at his most comfortable here, depicting the banality of everyday small-town life through the same kind of off-kilter lens that he has for the whole of his filmmaking career. There are some antics, a couple of extended improve-heavy comedic cameos, and the laying off of some bare-bones but effective groundwork for the primary characters (with the women getting notably less to work with, but I will get to that more in a second). What really works about this section of the film is the combination of Hess’ direction, composer Mark Mothersbaugh’s score, and the actual focus on Sebastian Eugene Hansen’s character of Henry.
By the time the narrative gets going, and everyone gets sucked into the Minecraft universe, it often feels like both any visual choices Hess makes and any musical choices that Mothersbaugh makes are entirely drowned by a deluge of slop. Visually, so much of the film becomes digitized for the final two-thirds, and every single visual choice feels like it’s the laziest, most automated one possible. It’s clear that huge swaths of this were simply designed in pre-visualization, and it leaves the film feeling remarkably dull and banal. Musically, the edit becomes infatuated with slotting in erroneous ‘80s needle drops that don’t really fit the scene or the tone of the film and instead just serve to utterly bombard the viewer. Even worse, this regulates Mothersbaugh’s score to the backburner, with it hardly even leaving an impact after the first act.
These problems are indicative of the way the film utterly loses any sense of footing it has once it transitions into the actual Minecraft stuff, and nowhere is that more obvious than in the film’s treatment of Henry as a character. Sure, the first act has some odd pacing and atonal moments, but it remains focused on the story of Henry, its child protagonist. By the time the film migrates over to the Minecraft world, it all but forgets about Henry entirely. The vast majority of screen time is instead dominated by Jack Black and Jason Momoa, having what amount to riff-off competitions, in which the two charismatic performers are clearly just improvising off of one another for extended periods of time. It sure seems like they had a lot of fun on set together, but that doesn’t make it fun to watch, as the film dilutes attention away from its main character in favor of some good old-fashioned farts and hit-in-the-balls jokes. By the time the film’s climax rolls around and attempts to put heavy emotional emphasis on Henry, it falls so completely flat, specifically because the film has all but forgotten that this character even exists for the majority of the runtime.
Another casualty of Black and Momoa’s extended riffing is the female characters in the film. Both Myers and Brooks’ characters get little to do other than stand around either fretting about the safety of one of the male characters or rolling their eyes at their silly antics. There’s even a scene that goes out of its way to make sure the audience knows that Myers’ character (who is Henry’s sister and several years his senior) is canonically far physically weaker than Henry, which is why she’s unable to mine as efficiently as he can. It’s groan-inducing stuff that feels decades behind the curve, reinforcing grossly outdated stereotypes about the kinds of roles women can take on in video game culture.
By the second and third acts, any time that isn’t taken up by Black and Momoa riffing is instead devoted to a seemingly endless deluge of recyclable, interchangeable, and utterly unexciting action sequences. The characters are changed by zombies, they’re chased by skeletons, and they’re chased by pigs, and every sequence just feels like it’s a copy-paste of the last.
But don’t fret, Minecraft faithful, because even with all of this going on, the film still finds time to bring things screeching to an absolute halt so that a character, location, or thing from the video game can show up onscreen with an ungodly lengthy pause afterward so that the audience can cheer. It’s one thing for a film’s editing to cater to an expected audience reaction, to help better structure a great theatrical viewing experience, but it’s something else entirely to just full-tilt stop the movie so that Jack Black can essentially pivot between being a character in the film and making a YouTube easter egg video simultaneously.
RGM GRADE
(D)
At the end of the day, I’m just not really sure who A Minecraft Movie is for. Anyone who is unfamiliar with the source material will be both bored by the dryer-than-sandpaper story and lost by the inside-baseball references and explanations. But simultaneously, if I loved Minecraft, I can’t imagine that I would love seeing a film adaptation that just opts to speed-run through things I might recognize from it with zero resonance or satisfaction.
