April 3, 2025
by Carla Hay
Directed by Jared Hess
Culture Representation: Taking place on Earth and in a magical place called the Overworld, the fantasy/action film “A Minecraft Movie” (based on the “Minecraft” video game series) features a predominantly white group of people (with a few African Americans) representing the working-class and middle-class.
Culture Clash: Five people get caught up in the Overworld, where there’s a battle over a magical cubed crystal and a magical orb.
Culture Audience: “A Minecraft Movie” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of the “Minecraft” video game series, the movie’s headliners and fantasy action flicks that use visual effects to distract from a weak story.
“A Minecraft Movie” should be called “A Minecrap Movie.” This adaptation of the “Minecraft” video game series is a sloppy mishmash of incoherent action, bad jokes and a messy plot. It’s also a flimsy excuse for Jack Black to sing forgettable songs. Even though this movie is geared more toward children than adults, it’s an insult to people’s intelligence, regardless of age. And there’s more idiocy to come: “A Minecraft Movie” has an end-credits scene that’s a thinly veiled announcement that a sequel has already been planned.
Directed by Jared Hess, “A Minecraft Movie” had the freedom to make an entirely new story because the “Minecraft” games are about users building their own worlds with their own rules and inhabitants. The common denominator in “Minecraft” (which is the best-selling video game of all time) is that things and creatures are look like cube-shaped blocks. Unfortunately, that freedom to be clever is squandered in “A Minecraft Movie.” Chris Bowman, Hubbel Palmer, Neil Widener, Gavin James and Chris Galletta co-wrote the screenplay for “A Minecraft Movie,” which definitely looks like the screenplay suffers from “too many cooks in the kitchen” syndrome.
“A Minecraft Movie” is the type of movie where if you miss the first five to eight minutes, you might be confused for the rest of the movie. That’s because “A Minecraft Movie” begins with an overly long, rambling exposition dump from a narrator named Steve (played by Black), who says when he was a kid, he wanted to work in the mines to discover treasures. The only problem? Kids weren’t allowed to work in the mines.
Steve, who lives in a fictional U.S. city called Chuglass, grew up to work in a drab office in an unnamed job. (“A Minecraft Movie” was actually filmed in Auckland, New Zealand.) Steve compares how he is as an adult, compared to when he was a child: “Same shirt, same pants, no soul.” Steven revived his childhood dreams and went back to the mines. “This time, I was unstoppable,” Steven says.
During this mining excursion, Steve discovered a glowing cubed crystal and a glowing orb. When he put these two objects together, it opened a portal to a magical land called Overworld, which is described in the movie’s production notes as “a bizarre, cubic wonderland that thrives on imagination.” Keep that “imagination” part in mind when you see how little imagination this movie has.
Steve found out that he could create his own world, which he called Steve’s World, by using magical power that makes cube-shaped objects, similar to how people can build Lego objects. Some of the things he created included a loyal dog named Dennis and a casual restaurant called Steve’s Chicken Shack, which serves lava chicken. (Lava chicken is supposed to be spicy and hot, just like lava.)
Overworld has an area called Nether (which is Otherworld’s version of hell), where villains called Piglins (which look like pig mutants) live and have an insatiable desire for gold. The Piglins are led by Malgosha (played by Allan Henry and voiced by Rachel House), who is dressed like she thinks she’s the Grim Reaper. Malgosha is quite dull and predictable.
The Piglins tried to capture Steve and Dennis, but Steve and Dennis escape. During this escape, Steve give Dennis the glowing orb to hide underneath Steve’s waterbed back in Steve’s house on Earth. In hindsight, Steve thinks this was not a good hiding place. And he’s right because someone else ends up with the orb.
“A Minecraft Movie” then has a jumbled introduction to the four people who eventually end up joining Steve in Overworld to fight the Piglins.
- Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison (played by Jason Momoa) was a teenage world champion of a “Garbage Man” video game in 1989. Garrett acts like he’s stuck in 1989, including wearing a fringed leather jacket and singing along (very off-key) to Skid Row’s “I Remember You” when he’s driving in his beat-up car. Garrett lives and works in Chuglass, where he owns a video game store that’s close to getting evicted and going out of business.
- Natalie (played by Emma Myers) and Henry (played by Sebastian Hansen) are teenage siblings who have recently moved to Chuglass because Natalie has gotten a job as the social media manager for Chuglass Potato Chips. Natalie is supposed to be about 18 or 19 years old, but she looks like she’s about 15 or 16. Henry is about 14 or 15 years old. Their single mother recently died, which is why Natalie and Henry have moved to Chuglass to start a new life.
- Dawn (played by Danielle Brooks) is the real-estate agent who did the deal for the house where Natalie and Henry are living in Chuglass. Dawn (who is sometimes upbeat and sometimes sassy) also has other “side hustle” jobs, including providing zoo animals for parties and other events. She drives around in a car with the company name Zoo on Wheels, with some of the zoo animals in the car.
Garrett is desperate for money, so he goes to a place called Storage World, which is run by a sleazy operator named Daryl (played by Jemaine Clement) because Garrett thinks he can find something valuable in a box for an old video game called Cosmos. Garrett pays $900 in a Storage World auction for the box, but he is disappointed to find nothing of value in it. Instead, there’s a glowing object in the storage unit. Guess which glowing object it is.
“A Minecraft Movie” has a poorly written sequence of events to show how Garrett, Natalie, Henry and Dawn end up in the Overworld. Henry is a new student enrolled at Chuglass High School, where he’s immediately bullied by some other students for being a nerd. Natalie and Henry have very generic personalities that do not enliven this already limp story.
Vice Principal Marlene (played by Jennifer Coolidge) is the school official who meets with Natalie and Henry. She gives them an earful about having recently gone through a bitter divorce from her ex-husband Clemente, who is never seen in the movie. If you know that Coolidge has been typecast as playing flaky and weird characters, then you can easily predict what type of personality Vice Principal Marlene has and how she will act.
One day, Henry goes into Garrett’s video game store and thinks Garrett is so cool, he agrees to Garrett’s con game of saying he can be Henry’s life coach for $50 an hour. Henry is an aspiring rocket scientist, so he tries to impress his schoolmates by taking a life-sized skeleton model from biology class and attaching a jet pack to it. It’s a complete disaster, of course: There’s a big explosion that damages the some of the school’s property.
Henry is called into the office of Vice Principal Marlene because he’s in big trouble. Natalie is too busy at work and Henry doesn’t want her to find out. And so, Henry calls Garrett and asks Garrett to pretend to be Henry’s uncle who will be the adult to meet with Vice Principal Marlene about Henry causing this property destruction problem.
Garrett agrees to pretend to be Henry’s uncle, for a price. When Vice Principal Marlene sees Garrett, she acts horny and starts flirting with him. Later, the movie goes to unnecessary and very unfunny scenes of Vice Principal Marlene on a dinner date with a mute creature from Overworld.
Henry’s trouble at school leads up to a scene where he goes missing because he’s hanging out with Garrett but didn’t tell Natalie. Natalie panics when she can’t find Henry, so she calls Dawn to help her look for Henry. Dawn and Natalie eventually find Henry at Garrett’s house, shortly before Henry finds the glowing orb and the glowing cubed crystal in Garrett’s garage.
Even though there’s a handwritten note (presumably from Steve) saying not to put the crystal and the orb together, it should come as no surprise that curious Henry puts the crystal and the orb together. The portal opens and drags Henry, Natalie, Garrett and Dawn into the Overworld, where they meet Steve. If you don’t like the way this sequence of events is described, then imagine watching it all happen in the movie, where seeing it unfold is infinitely worse than getting a description.
“A Minecraft Movie” (whose visual effects are not as great as they should be) then becomes a chaotic blur of chase scenes and people inventing weapons in the Overworld to battle against the Piglins and other opponents. A place called Woodland Mansion is the key to getting the “heroes” back home. The movie gets even more tiresome when Steve and Garrett (who are both very loud and insecure) compete to be the “alpha male” of the Overworld. Meanwhile, the male characters in “A Minecraft Move” get the best action scenes, while the female characters spend half of their action scenes cheering on the male characters.
Throughout this dreadful movie, Garrett tells terrible jokes that shows he has a fixation on rear ends because he has say something vaguely sexual or violent in references to bottoms. For example, Steve breaks out into song about four times, which must’ve been something that actor/singer Black insisted on in his “Minecraft” contract, since he sings some songs (none of them award-worthy) that were written specifically for the movie. At one point, Steve sings his jingle for Steve’s Chicken Shack. Garrett’s response: “I have a small business too. And one thing I try not to do is have my jingles suck butt.”
The low-quality of the screenplay, the unimpressive acting performances, and the overall substandard filmmaking for “A Minecraft Movie” won’t make a difference to people who just want to see a “Minecraft” movie, no matter how terrible it is. Children under the age of 10 might be dazzled by the movie’s visuals, but experienced moviegoers can spot the raggedy computer-generated imagery in some of the scenes. “A Minecraft Movie” is a mind-numbing experience, which might satisfy viewers who don’t care about having an inventive story in a “Minecraft” world. People who care about preserving their brain cells should steer clear of this cinematic abomination.
Warner Bros. Pictures will release “A Minecraft Movie” in U.S. cinemas on April 4, 2025.
