A Minecraft Movie

Deliberately silly and intentionally surreal, this comedy loses its way a little in the final act, but for the most part it’s a lot more fun and entertaining than I was expecting.

Premise:  Four misfits (Jason Momoa, Emma Myers, Danielle Brooks and Sebastian Hansen) find themselves trapped in a strange cubic world after accidentally activating an “orb” that used to belong to a former doorknob salesman (Jack Black).

Review:

Some toy/game adaptations transcend their source material (like The Lego Movies and Barbie), while others at least have a lot of storyline to use as inspiration for their big screen transition (like Tomb Raider, Uncharted, and the original Resident Evil films).  Then there are the adaptations that really just end up being an excuse to string together a checklist of elements from the game, like 2023’s disappointing The Super Mario Bros. Movie.

I suspected that A Minecraft Movie would fall into this latter category, given that the popular videogame is not exactly what you’d call story-driven.  But instead, this leans into the comedy even more than films like the Sonic the Hedgehog movies, as it embraces the most absurd and comical elements of the concept to deliver a film that I found to be genuinely funny despite me having no real interest in or familiarity with the Minecraft games.

“…delightfully silly & intentionally nonsensical…”

The success of A Minecraft Movie is entirely down to the humour and the casting.  Jason Momoa was inspired casting, in his most overtly comical role yet as Garrett ‘The Garbage Man’ Garrison, a man who’s still trading on his former glory as a 1980s videogame champion.  He makes a great comedy pairing with Jack Black, who in this film is almost the “sensible one” compared to Momoa’s gloriously unself-aware buffoon.

The comedy in this film is delightfully silly and intentionally nonsensical – you’ll probably decide within the first five minutes if you can gel with its tone or not, as we have a lengthy prologue in which we meet Jack Black’s Steve, a disgruntled doorknob salesman who has “longed for the mines” since he was a child, who then decides to chase his dreams only to discover a magical “orb” (in the shape of a cube) that transports him to a cubic world where he befriends a wild dog and names him Dennis, before he’s eventually confronted by the evil queen of pig-creatures who want to conquer the cubic world.  It sounds ridiculous on paper … but it’s also presented as being ridiculous in the film, and it’s the film’s willingness to laugh at itself that makes the whole tongue-in-cheek experience so much fun.

“…a feel-good, silly, surreal, over-the-top comedy…”

That’s not to say the film is not without its issues – the plot itself is very derivative, the other characters (Emma Myers’ Natalie, her younger brother Henry (played by Sebastian Hansen) and their estate agent, Danielle Brooks’ Dawn) don’t get a great deal of depth, and the final act is quite cliched – but all of that can be forgiven when the rest of the film is such silly fun, with a surreal subplot involving Jennifer Coolidge’s vice principle, and a great comedic voice performance from Rachel House as the evil ‘Piglin’ queen.

So although A Minecraft Movie is certainly not high art, it definitely did what it set out to do, which is provide a feel-good, silly, surreal, over-the-top comedy that’s at its best when it doesn’t hold back on its intentionally ridiculous and eccentric touches.