God Help Me, I Sincerely Enjoyed The Minecraft Movie!

Whoda thunk it?

One of the only downsides to watching every notable children’s movie with my ten-year-old son is that we end up seeing the same trailers over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. The same is true of commercials we’ve come to know by heart because we’ve seen them so damn often.

It’s very annoying to be subjected to the same thing over and over. This is particularly true when the trailer is so bad that it inspires dread rather than anticipation.

That was true of the poorly received Dwayne Johnson Christmas vehicle Red One. That movie sure looked like it would suck. Incidentally, my dumb brain is convinced that Jack Blak was in Red One because it was bloated and sucked, like so many of his vehicles, but also because Black was starring in his own dodgy Christmas movie at the time, Dear Santa.

It did! It was a real stinker. It was not worth the fifty-four cents I paid to watch it through the Regal Unlimited app.

Incidentally, I can’t recommend the Regal Unlimited program highly enough. You can see as many movies as you’d like for just under thirty dollars a month. If you go to the theaters every week or more, you save a lot of money. What a bargain!

Snow White similarly taunted my son and me with its excruciatingly awful trailer. It promised to be abysmal and delivered on its promise of ineptitude on a historic level.

On a similar note, trailers gave me long months to prepare for The Minecraft Movie's inevitable atrociousness.

Good lord did that movie look like it was going to suck! The character design looked hideous. The plot seemed derivative and generic. Movies based on popular video games do not have a great track record, quality-wise, and The Minecraft Movie looked like another loser willed into existence by the forces of commerce rather than creativity.

I try to go into every movie with an open mind, but I had a strong suspicion that The Minecrat Movie would suck.

I was wrong! The Minecraft Movie was one of the nicest surprises of the year film-wise, but it does not get off to a great start.

The Minecraft Movie opens with what feels like several hours of clunky exposition. Jack Black, who is legally obligated to be in every video game movie now, tells us what we need to know about the wacky, wonderful world of Minecraft and a whole lot more.

Because I am autistic, my executive functioning is piss poor, as is my concentration. So, if I am given excessive information from my wife or a 150-million-dollar kids movie, my overwhelmed brain does not retain anything more than is necessary. Most of this orgy of opening exposition was consequently wasted on me.

The filmmakers didn’t just hire popular comic actor and musician Jack Black to portray the role of Steve, a mining and imagination enthusiast who stumbles upon a magical land where everything is possible and block-shaped.

They hired JACK BLACK!!! They signed on for JACK BLACK at his Jack Blackiest. That includes MULTIPLE musical showcases for Black despite The Minecraft Movie not being a musical.

Jack Black begins the movie at 11. He’s flamboyantly himself to the nth power.

I am a big Jack Black fan. I spent ten dollars on Claptrap figure, the character he voices in the universally reviled 2024 video game adaptation Borderlands.

I nevertheless found myself hoping that Black would tone it down a little. He didn’t need to put quite so much pepper on each line of expository dialogue. It’s okay just to talk sometimes. Not everything has to be metal and in your face.

The Minecraft Movie loudly announces itself as The Jack Black Show, starring Jack Black at his Jack Blackiest. Then, confusingly, Black disappears for forty minutes so that it can focus on the real star, Jason Momoa, as Garrett "The Garbage Man" Garrison.

Momoa’s protagonist is essentially a more likable version of Billy Mitchell, the duplicitous villain of the classic video game documentary The King of Kong, in a pink leather jacket with fringe and a bad perm.

I was surprised to discover that The Minecraft Movie is the work of Jared Hess, the earnest Mormon cult filmmaker behind Napoleon Dynamite and less rapturously received comedies featuring tacky losers wearing ugly, dated clothing.

I was not a fan of Hess’s breakout film. I liked his subsequent work even less. However, I was intrigued by the idea of a low-budget indie weirdo like Hess being given one hundred fifty million dollars to make a tentpole video game adaptation.

The Minecraft Movie is easily the best film in Hess’s filmography. It’s a surprisingly satisfying blockbuster about tacky losers wearing ugly, dated clothing while exploring an alternate world similar to ours, but weirder and blockier.

Hess’s aesthetic is essentially K-Mart circa 1986. Times and fashions may change, but Hess’s sensibility remains in the Reagan decade.

Garrett is a struggling small businessman whose mind is similarly stuck in a past where he was a video game champion, not just a sad loser in unflattering garb.

A Minecraft Movie takes surprisingly long to introduce us to our other heroes. Danielle Brooks follows up her Oscar-nominated supporting turn in A Color Purple with a lighter performance as Dawn, an enterprising young woman whose hustles include real estate and a mobile zoo. Sebastian Hansen and Emma Myers round out the cast of heroes as Henry, an imaginative young man, and Natalie, his older sister and guardian.

The Minecraft Movie takes its sweet time sending its heroes to the Overworld, a fantastical world where anything can happen, and the only limits are the limits of the imagination.

Yet, I found myself warming to the movie all the same. The turning point was when Momoa’s time-warped loser says, “I’m not allowed in Kinko’s anymore,” with just the right note of resignation.

It reminds me of the all-time great gag in Pee-wee’s Big Adventure where Pee-wee sees that not everyone has remained quiet when he delivered a passionate presentation about his lost bike and yells to the worst offender, “Is this something you can share with the rest of us, Amazing Larry?”

Amazing Larry is a middle-aged man with a rainbow colored mohawk. Apparently, in earlier drafts of the script, they explain who the character is and his dynamic with Pee-Wee, but the filmmakers figured, correctly, that it’s funnier, weirder, and more random to have his three seconds onscreen be a total non-sequitur. Similarly, we never explicitly learn why the Garbage Man is no longer allowed at Kinko’s.

Hess's previous movies were funny-weird rather than funny-ha-ha. The Minecraft Movie, thankfully, is both funny-weird and funny-ha-ha. When it gets going in its second act, and the action has moved to Overland, The Minecraft Movie is consistently amusing and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, like when Momoa’s character somberly requests that he be remembered in song and that the song be heavy and finally be metal.

Because Minecraft has such a distinctive visual aesthetic, Hess’s smash does not look or feel like any other video game movie. Originality is a rare commodity in big-screen, big-budget video game adaptations. The Mineraft movie’s themes might be familiar, but it has a goofy surrealness all its own.

The Minecraft Movie is wonderfully silly and childlike. Hess once again lustily embraces the comedy of randomness and tackiness, but it’s actually funny this time.

There’s a wonderful gag late in the film where the chief villain, Malgosha, a pig-like monster who turned against creativity and imagination after experiencing setbacks in her dancing career as a young woman, attempts to kill Steve with her dying breaths.

Malgosha asks Steve to come closer, but he suspects that it’s a trick to get him within stabbing distance. She assures him that she’s not out to stab him, at which point she very weakly attempts to stab him.

The defeated and powerless evil leader keeps trying to stab Steve unsuccessfully. It’s a gag that works splendidly due to repetition. It’s like the legendary rake gag from The Simpsons in that respect. But it’s also funny because it represents such a feeble attempt at violence and villainy from a dying woman who does not realize that it’s over for her in every way.

Jack Black made a bit of a Faustian bargain. He tossed his good friend and bandmate Kyle Gass under the bus when he made a mild joke about wishing that Donald Trump’s would-be assassin had better aim so that The Minecraft Movie wouldn’t be picketed by angry protestors chanting, “Minecraft hates MAGA!”

Black sold some of his soul so The Minecraft Movie and The Super Mario Brothers sequel could make a billion dollars.

Was it worth it? Probably not, but at least it was for a movie that’s way better, way funnier, and way sillier than I expected.

The Minecraft Movie’s massive success makes a sequel inevitable. Like video game adaptations, sequels don’t have great reputations, particularly sequels to video game adaptations, but I’m actually looking forward to a follow-up.

Three and a half stars out of five