A Minecraft Movie is gold for children, torture for adults

A video game that was released in 2011 is now officially lucrative enough to spawn a Hollywood movie that appeals to kids.

If you were born before 1990, this means you are now officially old.

Minecraft ranks alongside Tetris, Grand Theft Auto, Fortnite and FIFA as the flagpole video game franchises that everybody knows or has at least heard about.

The game has sold tens of millions of copies since it was formally launched in 2011, and on the off chance you’ve been held as a political prisoner on the dark side of Jupiter with no access to culture since then, Minecraft lets players loose in an infinite world and lets them create whatever they want.

Minecraft is the closest that video games has to Lego, so a film version of Minecraft has an obvious template to follow; 2014’s The Lego Movie.

Phillip Lord and Christopher Miller’s blockbuster appealed to both adults and kids alike with its eye-catching visuals and heartwarming story, yet it somehow managed to capture the essence of playing with Legos in film form.

More recently, 2023’s Barbie and Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Among Thieves showed that filmmakers can tell personal and funny stories under the umbrella of a larger brand.

Barbie became the highest-grossing film of 2023, a major awards season player and a cultural touchstone because it explored the universal nature of the doll and Greta Gerwig had something to say about femininity in the modern era.

A Minecraft Movie doesn’t quite match up to those three examples, instead opting to play more like a traditional Jack Black kids comedy (now that’s a sentence that will make 90s kids feel old) than anything else.

There is a magic something or other that has the power to destroy the world, and the heroes have to save it; it’s hardly Lars Von Trier in terms of complexity.

Your enjoyment of A Minecraft Movie will depend entirely on how much you like Jack Black’s overbearing manchild sthick.

If you watch The Holiday every Christmas and want the ground to open up every time he’s on screen, A Minecraft Movie will be torture.

If you watch School Of Rock or Nacho Libre once a year, you will find plenty to like here.

For people who think that Jack Black saying things like “awesomearino” and bursting into song at random intervals is the death of cinema, stay clear of this film.

A Minecraft Movie is indeed directed by the director of Nacho Libre, Jared Hess.

Hess’ other big claim to fame was directing Napoleon Dynamite, so fans of those movies will instantly see the style that Hess is going for.

The film has been made in a lab to appeal to birthday parties for kids between the ages of five and 11 and will probably make its budget back from that demographic alone.

Much has been made about families, the lifeblood of cinematic distribution, skipping the cinema in recent times and waiting for a film to hit streaming where it can be watched any time.

In our reviews we typically mention if the film is worth seeing on a big screen or waiting for streaming, and we’d lean towards seeing this in a cinema, if only for the communal aspect of it.

Films like this gain a certain something from seeing it with a crowd and the communal experience of watching a well-placed punchline being deployed at the right moment.

A Minecraft Movie goes for the Goonies approach: gather an unlikely bunch of characters together and put them into increasingly outlandish situations.

It’s a screenwriting trick used by everyone from Billy Wilder to Shrek.

You have Jack Black and Jason Momoa as the manchildren who never grew up, some kid actors you’ve never heard of, and an overqualified actor clearly doing it for a paycheque (in this case, it’s Danielle Brooks, fresh off an Oscar nomination for the Colour Purple remake).

Jason Momoa has gone down the Arnold Schwarzenegger route – the absurdly huge man mountain now wants to be funny.

The most recent Aquaman film veered into outright comedy territory, and Momoa has been eager to show off his comedy chops.

To his credit, Momoa never acts like he’s above the project; it would have been easy to cast someone like The Rock who would treat the project with disdain, but Momoa is in on the joke.

In the most unrealistic piece of casting ever, Jason Momoa plays a man obsessed with arcade video games, eats bad food, and still happens to look like Jason Momoa.

The trick to a good kids’ film is to put something in there for the adults too – think Shrek 2 being a parody of Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner or Hercules having a joke about Oedipus  – and A Minecraft Movie works when you have Jennifer Coolidge interacting with the world of Minecraft.

The film has that strange Napoleon Dynamite energy and flirts with being good when it leans into the more surreal elements of the game.

The wildcard in the pack, and the reason to see the film, is Jennifer Coolidge.

For people who think the current season of the White Lotus is missing Coolidge’s demented energy, Coolidge popping in for three scenes makes the film worth seeing.

Her screentime is less than 10 minutes, but she makes every second count; it’s a bit like Sir Alex Ferguson bringing on Ole Gunnar Solskjaer to make an impact with limited time.

A Minecraft Movie easily could have been a disaster, but it was also unlikely to reach the heights of Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Among Thieves; it lands somewhere in the middle.

The real test of this film will come five years from now when little Séamus wants to watch the film for the 28th time that week on Netflix.

Jack Black’s mindless scatting and vamping might be enough to leave parents wishing for the world depicted in Mad Max.