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Since it’s one of the most financially successful films of modern times, I decided to satisfy my morbid curiosity about A Minecraft Movie — a movie I would otherwise never have seen, since it clearly wasn’t made for me. I’ve never played the video game it’s based on, and probably never will. So I came to this motion picture phenomenon as a clueless, total outsider. On the plus side, it was better than the cinematic blasphemy or abomination I was expecting. On the minus side, it is sorely lacking in originality and compelling characters. What’s more, it commits the number one cardinal sin in filmmaking: It’s boring.
Jack Black stars as Steve, a guy who discovers a portal to a video game world within an old mine. He likes this alternate reality where everything is built out of cubes and where he has the power to build things with the snap of a finger, so he decides to stay. But then he discovers another portal to yet another dimension containing a bunch of malevolent (yet adorable) square pig creatures who want to — hell, I don’t know — do bad things or something. The pig creatures capture Steve, but he sends his beloved dog into the real world for help. The dog is responsible for bringing four other humans into the video game world. Jason Momoa (Game of Thrones) is the only famous actor in the bunch, and none of these characters are interesting enough to mention here. Steve ends up uniting with Momoa and the other three, and they all try to find a crystal box to put some glowing cube in — so they can get home again. But the pigs want the box and the cube, too. So there are many battles until the movie, which feels three hours long (but is actually less than two hours) finally, mercifully ends.
Jack Black gets credit for being overly-enthusiastic for reasons beyond explanation. I think it’s just to keep the audience awake. Momoa, dressed and hair-styled so hideously that he’s hard to look at, is wasted here. Jennifer Coolidge (Stifler’s Mom in the American Pie movies) has a couple of laughs playing her regular clueless self, this time in the role of a school principal and divorcee who falls in love with a mute, goofy-looking video game character. The soundtrack is occasionally exciting, whether through some pop tunes or Mark Mothersbaugh’s gitchy, action scoring. And while the whole square-cube, lego-like world is overall very ugly to me, I liked a few things about it — most notably some large hot air balloons that shoot fireballs at people. Oh, and it’s cute to see Jack Black riding Jason Momoa through the air in one sequence. (Cute in a drug-induced hallucinogenic way, which is probably the best way to watch this movie.)
None of this is enough to make me ever want to see Minecraft again. It was barely enough to get me through one viewing. The plot is generic, like something A.I. would conjure when prompted. Its grasp on reality is so tenuous, the characters have no believability at all — they aren’t real. There’s no verisimilitude. Nothing about this movie is real or grounded or remotely serious enough to care about, so it gets tediously dull very quickly. There’s nothing for the audience to grab onto emotionally, conceptually, or thematically. It’s just a big cartoon — the sort of thing that should entertain children of a single-digit age, but no one else.
Unless they’re tripping.
With Sebastian Hansen, Emma Myers, and Danielle Brooks. Directed by Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre).