‘A Minecraft Movie’ is deeply unpleasant (except for Jason Momoa)

The story follows Steve (Jack Black), the game’s blue-clad default skin, turned not so much into a character as something vaguely character-esque. Once a child and now an adult (that’s as far as his backstory goes), Steve has long yearned to enter a secret, protected mine. Here, he finds a mysterious blue device—dubbed the “orb” despite its cubic appearance, a joke about how the game’s graphics render round shapes—which transports him from the real world into the block-like realm of Minecraft, known to its residents as the Overworld. Its cube-like bees, pigs and trees take after the game’s pixelated appearance (it’s made up of large voxels—pixels in 3-D), but the movie’s polygonal shapes clash oddly with its photorealistic textures.

This isn’t a problem for the more cartoonish creatures, like skeletons and other ghouls that roam the Overworld at night. However, it makes for a gross, uncanny combination when applied to the realm’s nonverbal human villagers, and the squarish pig-people who populate the Nether, a hellish dimension connected to the Overworld via another, similar portal. Steve refers to the Nether as “a place with no joy or creativity at all.” Unfortunately, this doubles as a warning about the movie itself.

Led by the witch sow Malgosha (Rachel House), these swine-folk seek to steal the orb from Steve for nefarious reasons. But, in a long, expository montage, the human hero ends up captured, but sends the glowing MacGuffin back to the real world via his cube-shaped pet wolf Dennis. This entire history feels like it ought to have been a feature of its own, but it functions as a brief prologue to the intro of several other characters entirely, back in our reality. There’s the smalltown newcomer Henry (Sebastian Hansen), a nerdy adolescent bullied for thinking outside the box. He lives with his teenage sister Natalie (Emma Myers), a caring but exceptionally plain character, whose shades are never filled in as the film goes on. There’s also the siblings’ real estate agent, the animal enthusiast Dawn (Danielle Brooks), who has even fewer dimensions. Finally, there’s the film’s most fun and interesting character, Jason Momoa’s local pseudo-celebrity Garrett "The Garbage Man" Garrison, the gruff owner of a dwindling, vintage video game store, introduced in an amusing Rocky-style montage in which he works out his gaming fingers. Garrett, who dresses like a cross between a beach bum and ‘90s wrestling mainstay Bret “The Hitman” Hart, is a Gen X adult stuck in (and trying to relive the glory days of) the late 1980s, back when he was an arcade gaming champion. Unfortunately, you’d have to dig deep to find a laugh that doesn’t emanate from Momoa’s self-deprecating performance.

Garrett speaks in snappy, action movie catchphrases and broken Spanish, with which he convinces Henry to become his protégé in the art of not-being-a-loser. A number of happenstances lead to the mentor-mentee pair finding and activating the orb, which transports them to the Overworld alongside—for no good reason—Natalie and Dawn. Steve frees himself from the pigs and joins these strangers in short order before mayhem ensues, but not the fun kind.

What follows is a chaotic film in which the characters move between various scenarios designed to be familiar to Minecraft players—if you miss a reference, don’t worry, Black is sure to point it out—but these scenes barely feel connected. At best, they’re strung together with limp explanations resembling a plot—“We have to go to place A to acquire item B!”—but the movie doesn’t really have a bigger picture, except in theory. Steve mentions that Malgosha and her pig people want to strip the Overworld of creativity, but what that means in practice is anyone’s guess.

The methods by which the human characters oppose her are also thematically self-defeating. The rules of this world involve forging objects from gathered raw materials, and building structures out of blocks, though we only ever see about a minute of this “mining” and “crafting.” The heroes’ weapons are usually made by scattering a few blocks on a table and smacking them once, causing a sword or gun to materialize. There’s no real skill involved. It’s the least creative endeavor imaginable—as though The LEGO Movie had replaced its artistic spirit with characters entering text prompts and hitting a “generate” button. It’s the perfect film for the age of generative A.I.

No character seems to have any wit or foresight. Then again, the plot barely gives them the chance, since it entails a hodgepodge of random events, rather than distinct challenges to be overcome. “Creativity is key to survival,” Steve says. But despite the endless possibilities, and the freedom to build any structure and device, the most creative thing anyone seems to do is throw smaller blocks that transform into slightly larger ones.

The story feels entirely overstuffed, despite having only five central characters. Henry works as a sympathetic pre-teen protagonist, but there’s no real moment where he comes into his own or proves himself through creative assembly, despite being set up as a burgeoning genius. Dawn and Natalie usually stand around and make observations in the form of irreverent one-liners (“This place makes no sense!”). They may as well have been combined into one character. Similarly, Black and Momoa play the same kind of quippy, outwardly masculine manchildren, with neither contrast nor friction between them. Little would have been lost if the film had combined Steve and Garrett too.

Black is usually a delight in these kinds of juvenile, high-energy roles (see also: the Jumanji sequels, which happen to be far superior video game self-inserts). Here, his verbal affects verge on grating. He seems to have been directed to over-emphasize any and all references to the game, which constitutes about 80 percent of his dialogue. This leads to a further disconnect in terms of who this movie is actually for. Black sounds like he’s hosting a Nickelodeon show for 4 year olds (à la Blue’s Clues or Dora the Explorer). Henry and Natalie, meanwhile, exist in an Amblin-esque adventure drama for maladjusted teens, albeit with all sincerity replaced by snark. Garrett, the closest thing the movie has to a soul, further complicates this question by playing to middle-aged adults lost in childhood nostalgia (in this movie about a very recent game). His cloying desperation to be taken seriously by younger generations is sad and amusing, akin to the famous (and frequently meme’d) Steve Buscemi 30 Rock scene: “How do you do, fellow kids?”

Unfortunately, that same desperation applies to A Minecraft Movie too. While the narrative tries to frame Garrett as a loser, the film all but embodies his worst tendencies: it’s a backward-gazing Gen X product trying awkwardly to speak the language of Gen Z. Rather than having Garrett progress through the Overworld via its video game mechanics—the one thing he’s good at!—his end goal seems to be collecting gems and other treasures, making the movie seem just as cynical as he is, but with no redemption or catharsis. The answers to every lingering thematic problem seems to be just one re-write away (though with six credited screenwriters, maybe the real problem was one draft too many).

It isn’t so much an “all ages” film as it is several disparate ones with wildly different target markets unfolding in close proximity. One emblematic issue is its entirely unrelated subplot (if one can call it that) wherein Henry’s flirty high school vice principal (Jennifer Coolidge) meets and falls for one of the square-shaped villagers who finds his way to the real world. This has no bearing on how the central plot plays out, but the movie cuts back to it endlessly, resulting in a repetitive romance gag that never seems to illuminate the dichotomy between the real and video game worlds. Similarly, no one notices a wolf made of square blocks running around town, even though back in Overworld, the characters seem fascinated that such things can exist.

By the end, it’s hard to say whether the human characters in A Minecraft Movie see these block-like creatures as anything out of the ordinary—let alone what stakes remain for them. At no point does anyone seem in danger of physical harm, or like they want or need anything from the story as it unfolds. In the process, how the audience is meant to feel about this realm (and its creatures) remains uncertain. Little of the Overworld is portrayed with whimsy, or rendered in exciting, eye-popping ways. Few human actors feel like they were ever on an actual set together, and rare are the moments when the film has a distinct sense of physical space during its action scene, which unfolds with an Electric State-level of emotional uninvolvement.

This lack of discernible geography is especially egregious for an adaptation of a video game centered on using space in creative ways. It makes it hard to think of it as a story set in an artistically invigorating world—or really, much of a story at all—despite its characters’ insistence that creativity is at stake. Then again, for any audience punished with 100 minutes of A Minecraft Movie, it probably feels that way.