Weeks before A Minecraft Movie hit theaters Friday, the social media floodgates had already burst open.
Previews of Jack Black’s idiosyncratic one-liners and an unfinished leak of the film echoed the disastrous rollout of Sonic the Hedgehog in 2019, when audiences balked at the original character design. The response was so bad that Paramount halted production, redesigned Sonic and returned with a vision that ultimately succeeded at the box office.
Warner Bros. did no such thing with A Minecraft Movie. Instead, the studio charged ahead with unabashed confidence in its product, though it might’ve been wiser to pull back before plunging into the public eye.
The film arrived with plenty of fanfare but it fell flat, weighed down by its meandering, uninspired plot and jarring tonal shifts, likely the result of having a staggering nine credited writers.
While the movie’s main appeal was to nostalgic players looking for simple laughs and Minecraft in-jokes, even that felt far-fetched. Especially with a thin, wandering plot of coincidental happenings and characters that lack substantial backstories and distinctive personalities.
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The cast might seem like a random assortment at first glance, but the ensemble shares great chemistry, especially Black and Jason Momoa, who comedically bounce off each other despite occasionally clunky dialogue. Black, of course, gets his own moment — or three — to sing.
It’s clear the studio hoped for a hit like “Peaches” from The Super Mario Bros. Movie, but failed to land it.
Unfortunately, the Black-Momoa duo spark doesn’t extend to the rest of the cast. Early in the movie, the main group of five is pared down to three when the party decides to split up, which effectively removes the only two female leads for the rest of the film. The central duo — Henry and sister Natalie — is a flat take on sibling camaraderie considering they rarely interact and the movie spends too much time explaining their backstory.
Surprisingly, the movie also includes a shocking amount of violence and sexual innuendos for a PG-rated film marketed to children. It features several on-screen deaths of animals and villagers, a bizarre moment where Black rides a flying Momoa — I can’t make this up — and an awkward romance between Jennifer Coolidge’s character and a villager. Truly, the film feels like a demographic identity crisis.
A large portion of the movie’s monstrous $150 million budget went to the massive amount of CGI necessary to bring an open-world setting to life.
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While much of the animation dazzles, including the detailed texturing on blocks of pink wool and leafy trees, other visuals were uncanny. The fleshy texture of the zombies and villagers were particularly unsettling.
The realistic effects do help with decent immersion and worldbuilding, but for a film so reliant on CGI, I expected more.
There were shimmering moments of creativity in the movie’s practical props, such as a small golden apple or a perfectly round-yet-pixelated “ender pearl.” It might’ve been more quaint to see more of the film take this practical route, perhaps using puppets or animatronics. With such a large budget, it certainly wasn’t out of the realm of possibility.
With humor too raunchy, scenes too terrifying for children and a plot too thin for adults, A Minecraft Movie misses every mark and audience it tries to reach.
For a movie meant as an ode to a culturally impactful game that offers players unlimited story possibilities, A Minecraft Movie boxes itself into a generic Hollywood script, infused with internet-soaked cheap shots and expensive, underwhelming CGI.
In the end, it left me with the same hollow feeling as scrolling through two hours of low-grade Instagram reels — the sort of grimy guilt that comes from consuming something so empty, you forget it even happened by the next day.
That said, I do kind of want to play Minecraft now.
