A MINECRAFT MOVIE Review: Blocked and Reported

We built this algorithm block by block. The IP movie has been on the rise of late -- tent-poles such as Barbie and The Super Mario Bros Movie each raked in over a billion dollars -- and so it is that A Minecraft Movie has spawned into cinemas.

The input lag has been severe. Warner Bros.' idea for a film adaptation of Mojang's record-breakingly successful indie game 'Minecraft' was first seeded back in 2014, and the project has undergone many refreshes, reboots, and changings of the guard before finally releasing as this year's 1.0 release directed by Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre). A total of five screenwriters are credited. It shows.

Jack Black is Steve, the game's default avatar, here turned exposition oracle. Steve spends his days flitting about 'The Overworld', a greenscreen CG rendition of Minecraft-land he discovered as a child whilst curiously exploring an abandoned mine. He's perfectly happy at play there, befriending a wild wolf named Dennis and spending his days building, crafting, and enjoying many other familiar gameplay mechanics. But one day Dennis disappears, and Steve is left all alone.

Cut to: the real world open road. Jason Momoa speeds along in a flashy car, himself decked out in a pink prog rock jacket and sunglasses that scream '80s retro in a fast fashion font. Also on the move are Henry (Sebastian Hansen) and his sister Natalie (Emma Myers), adolescents heading to a new town for a fresh start. Momoa's character, Garret 'The Garbage Man' Garrison, runs a struggling retro videogame store. We're also introduced to Dawn (Danielle Brooks), a real estate agent. These characters cross paths, but their connections are thinly drawn, foundations with little built upon them.

The first act of A Minecraft Movie sits somewhere between CollegeHumor skit and Skittles-induced hallucination, its connection to the film you thought you'd bought a ticket for tenuous at best. A potato chip factory is blown up by a makeshift rocket in an act of accidental terrorism.

Jemaine Clement shows up to host a garage auction with a disquietingly strangled accent. Jennifer Coolidge's school principal, Marlene, makes sexually-suggestive remarks to human action figure Jason Momoa. Hess is competent in this mode of breezy post-Rushmore comedy. Slight as A Minecraft Movie's ricocheting real-world scenes are, they're at least entertaining.

Things go downhill fast once our grab bag of heroes are transported via portal to The Overworld. The film's rendition of Minecraft's grassy cube plains is aesthetically unpleasant, flocked and fuzzy, less resembling the original game and more an uninspired, garishly oversaturated texture pack.

The world sits around our heroes statically and unconvincingly, like a poorly-implemented static Zoom background. Strangely, the group doesn't question the bizarre new world they find themselves in, instead getting straight to work with Encountering Things and Having Experiences. It's a moment-to-moment mimetic checklist of elements familiar to players of the videogame, an approach not dissimilar to Illumination's The Super Mario Bros. Movie.

Some of these are cute. Placable blocks hover in characters' hands as floating signifiers before they're thrown into place. A warning that nighttime occurs every twenty minutes is met with knowing laughs. But the film doesn't lean-in to the fact that its mechanics function as moving parts within a videogame world like Illumination's Mario does, and the result is jarringly distanced and incohesive.

The group find themselves in need of aid when night falls, and in steps Steve as their handy tour guide. How much you'll care to tune in depends on how welcoming you are of Jack Black on energised autopilot, doing his Jack Black shtick loudly and monotonously.

It's disappointing that Black hasn't taken the opportunity to develop an actual character here, but it's not entirely his fault. Massively-merchandised as Steve is, Minecraft's avatar doesn't have the instantly-recognizable characteristics or charisma of other videogame icons such as Mario; indeed, the initial confounded, angry reactions to the character's reveal for Nintendo's Super Smash Bros. fighting game evidenced this.

In Warner's film, Steve is less a narrative anchor, more an IP salesman, leaping around the CG environment yelling about game mechanics and how cool they are, only stopping short of informing us of pricing, terms and conditions, and what's sold separately. And when this somehow-big-screen blockbuster isn't operating in a Saturday morning toy commercial mode, it adopts the humour of an SNL parody, with the same level of remove and surface-level understanding of its source material. This is barely a feature film.

Let's talk about Coolidge, who is as much a non-sequitur in the film as she is in this review. In A Minecraft Movie's bizarre and unwarranted fanfiction-esque subplot, Marlene strikes up a romance with a Villager from The Overworld, who has inadvertently stumbled through a portal to the real world. Seeing the Minecraft villagers rendered in their new CG form induces a visceral discomfort; they're Cenobite-esque beings with a blubbery, jelly-like movement.

After hitting the wandering stray with her car, she wines and dines it. We cut to and from these confounding, brief interludes with all the editing grace of TV remote channel flipping. It's a subplot that reeks of desperation, both to entice jaded adults to the theater and to disguise the film's skeletal, fragmented screenplay.

Coolidge's subplot provides welcome humor and relief from the main plot's inanity, but it highlights A Minecraft Movie's strangest issue: women. None of the characters, male or female, are particularly well-developed -- they're decidedly low-poly, in fact -- but it's odd to see a 2025 kids' film seemingly determined not to pass the Bechdel test. Any ambition and dream of creative success is given to Henry and Garret, whilst Natalie and Dawn's function is to pragmatically support their pipedreams.

Representation isn't much better in The Overworld, where evil is afoot. Minecraft's parallel underworld, The Nether, is here rendered as a Mega Bloks Mordor, from where an evil crone with a Saruman staff commands a rogue's gallery of pigmen with comically unsuited voices, one of whom is inexplicably named 'General Chungus'. The ensuing battles have a distinctly Peter Jackson composition to them also, and feel off-brand (Remember the massive-scale army battle gameplay in Minecraft? Me neither).

An escape sequence involving Redstone circuitry is genuinely thrilling -- a smart transposing of the game's mechanics to pure popcorn action -- but there's too little of this energy. 2023's The Super Mario Bros Movie demonstrated the core fun of its source material with a captivating kineticism. A Minecraft Movie, on the other hand, barely features any actual building with blocks. The 'craft' part of the title is more accounted for, albeit primarily in the construction of weaponry. This focus is a skewed representation of the source material, a concerned and confused parent's idea of the game rather than an accurate summation of its simple pleasures.

It's disheartening that Minecraft's promise of boundless creativity has been translated to a film so devoid of it. Perhaps its most honest play is that title. It's A Minecraft Movie, not The Minecraft Movie - just one of infinite possibilities for what this project could have been. New Game.

The film opens Friday, April 4, only in movie theaters, via Warner Bros. Visit the official site for locations and showtimes.