'A Minecraft Movie' film review: Video game flick best left in the gaming backlog
For a video game rooted in creativity, the fetch quest focused 'A Minecraft Movie' (in theaters everywhere April 4) is shockingly unoriginal.
In short: Four humans are pulled through a portal into a bizarre cubic world. To get back home they'll have to find a powerful cube before it falls into the hands of the evil rule of the dark Nether. Stars Jason Momoa, Jack Black, Danielle Brooks, Emma Myers, and Sebastian Hansen.
For almost 15 years, Minecraft has endured as a landmark video game because if it's lack of feeling like a standard video game. Players are just dropped into a world - and from here the choices are near limitless. Players can explore vast lands, freely build incredible structures, design impressive machines or simply battle the world's many dangerous monsters. This sandbox formula empowers the player to make their Minecraft experience uniquely their own.
'A Minecraft Movie,' however, is just a standard fish out of water flick bogged down by a "go find the McGuffin" plot - with a lot of annoying filler shoehorned in to pad the runtime. And about that runtime - without the end credits and an exposition-rich prologue, 'Minecraft Movie' is less than an hour and a half - yet the movie feels so much longer.
Even if everyone agrees that no one is watching a 'Minecraft Movie' for its plot, then at least the game should properly adapt the experience or the appeal of what has made the namesake video game so popular for so long. Yet, aside from the overall game mechanics and world the movie is set in, virtually nothing about the plot is pulled from the game. The best adapted works tap into the feel and vibe of the original material - but 'A Minecraft Movie' is just a group of screaming human characters trapped in a silly world, fleeing from angry pig monsters.
The nail in the coffin of this unoriginal adventure that barely feels like a Minecraft vibe: the characters are obnoxious. Steve, the video game's main character, is just Jack Black being Jack Black ... but this time while wearing clothes that sorta look like he's cosplaying as Minecraft Steve. The plot hints at Jack Black searching for the powerful cube for his own agenda - one that would definitely conflict with the other main characters who just want to go home - but this throughline is all but abandoned quickly. Jason Momoa's washed up video game bro is the closest thing 'Minecraft Movie' has to a dynamic character - but he's mostly just a buffoon.
‘A Minecraft Movie’ is honestly the perfect title for this slop. It’s lazy. It’s cookie cutter. It denotes an utter lack of originality. The difference between ‘A’ and ‘The’ denotes a studio just cynically and lazing crapping out something that approximates Minecraft sort of. Everything in this movie is either unoriginal or annoying - literally the exact opposite of the titular source material.
Final verdict: ‘A Minecraft Movie’ is a shallow, plot driven adaptation that focuses more on running away from monsters than the spirit of creativity and freedom - the actual magic of what makes ‘Minecraft’ amazing.
Score: 2/5
'A Minecraft Movie' opens in theaters nationwide April 4. The video game adventure has a runtime of 101 minutes and is rated PG for violence/action, language, suggestive/rude humor and some scary images.
