“A Minecraft Movie” is, by all accounts, a cinematic failure on nearly every level. The entire film is a baffling mess from start to finish.
The story, if you can call it that, was completely nonsensical and largely felt like there was little rhyme or reason for large parts of the film to happen. It follows a group of people from the real world who, through a sequence of wacky experiments, find a cube that takes them to the world of Minecraft. The real world’s main characters are Hank, Garrett, Natalie, and Dawn. From there, they find Steve — played by Jack Black — and get his help to go back home and fight Malgosha, a pig sorceress, as well as her army. As off-the-wall as that may sound, that’s just scratching the surface of what the film has to offer. There is even a subplot about a villager from the Minecraft world accidentally coming to the real world, and he ends up going on a date with the principal of Hank’s school, who is played by Jennifer Coolidge.
The performances in the film range from forgettable to very surprising, for better and for worse. Jack Black, in particular, is fun, but it doesn’t feel like he’s playing the character of Steve; it feels like he’s just being himself. Jason Momoa was probably the most entertaining actor in the film. It feels like he knows the script is terrible, so he’s just hamming it up, and some of his jokes were pretty much the only ones that landed.
Visually, this film looks atrocious, with the camera being very stilted and the visual effects not looking particularly good. Everything in the Minecraft world just does not look good, not because of the visual effects, but because the designs on most of the characters from there are hard to look at a lot of the time. A lot of the Minecraft characters end up looking uncanny or too realistic to the point where they become uncomfortable to look at.
The film at times tries to get you emotionally invested, but fails completely on all fronts. It was impossible to take seriously at any point, since most scenes like that just felt like a joke. Everything about the film is bewildering, and it felt like it was a fever dream half the time. It is not particularly enjoyable unless you’re with a good group of friends or a theater that is in on the joke. Shockingly, this film was released in this state, and it is best left avoided.