By Seth Lukas Hynes
A Minecraft Movie
Starring Jack Black, Jason Momoa and Emma Myers
PG
2.75/5
A Minecraft Movie captures the feel and style of the source game like few other video game adaptations, but fails to craft an engaging movie even as it mines gold with our nostalgia.
After stumbling into a fantastical realm made entirely of cubes, a group of friends team up with a legendary crafter named Steve (Jack Black) to save the realm from an evil conqueror.
Like The Super Mario Bros Movie (a 2023 video game movie that made over a billion dollars globally), A Minecraft Movie is upbeat, colourful and will amuse young viewers and nostalgic older players alike, and features several exciting action set-pieces.
However, the awkward humour is sledgehammer-blunt, and the characters are barely-written or obnoxious (in Jason Momoa’s case, both).
Momoa’s character, washed-up video game champion Garrett Garrison, is also a dated stereotype.
A Minecraft Movie recreates the aesthetics and rules of Minecraft extremely faithfully, but since the game is so whimsical and far-removed from our reality – gravity is more of a suggestion, you can build giant structures effortlessly and, of course, everything is cubes – a fully-animated adaptation would have been a better choice.
With the “Overworld” being so stylised, especially after the mostly redundant first-act set-up in our world, nothing around the actors feels real – much like the new Snow White movie – and the events therefore carry little weight (despite some surprisingly dark action beats).
A Minecraft Movie is the opposite of the 2008 Max Payne film, which was a decent neo-noir crime thriller but a poor adaptation of the Max Payne games.
Both a successful adaptation and a blunt, shallow and superficially fun film, A Minecraft Movie is playing in most Victorian cinemas.
