By Jake Wilson
A MINECRAFT MOVIE ★★½
(PG), 100 minutes
Look, I get that Minecraft is a huge deal. I get that it’s the biggest video game of all time. And even if I’m not one of its hundreds of millions of players, I get the appeal of a virtual world that lets you build castles, skyscrapers, underground lairs, or whatever else you can imagine.
Jack Black, Jason Momoa and Sebastian Hansen in A Minecraft Movie.Credit: AP
What I don’t entirely get is the core concept. As best I can make out, the setting is an alternate dimension much like our own, but also extremely different: everything and everyone is visibly assembled out of cubes, including the various quasi-human tribes of zombies, skeletons, wooden-looking “villagers” with long noses, and so forth.
There’s also an additional hell dimension, populated by piglike demons, or demonic pigs, who hate creativity and spend their time plotting to stamp it out with the aid of magical artefacts such as the Orb of Dominance (also a cube, despite its appellation).
At least, that’s how it goes down in A Minecraft Movie, a chaotic cash-in directed by Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite) from a script with five credited writers, which grafts a stock fantasy quest onto a landscape where plot was never the point.
For the older members of the audience, there are also a lot of jokes about 1980s kitsch, especially in the first act, which takes a weirdly long time to introduce the characters and bring them together, starting with Jack Black as the narrator Steve, a former office drone who years ago fled into the Minecraft universe where he gets to be the boss.
Demonic pigs in A Minecraft Movie spend their time plotting to stamp out creativity.Credit: AP
He also gets to serve as a guide for new arrivals, such as the orphaned budding rocket scientist Henry (Sebastian Hansen), and the washed-up former arcade game champion Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison (Jason Momoa), whose arrested development is symbolised by his wardrobe of flamboyantly fringed jackets.
The film’s comic ensemble has potential, but it’s a little off-balance. Black and Momoa are playing similarly boisterous man-children to the point where it’s unclear why both are needed, while Henry, the actual child in the mix, eyes them sceptically like a junior Paul Rudd.
The women are supporting players, including Emma Myers from Netflix’s Wednesday as Henry’s sensible older sister and guardian (the backstory about their mother’s death appears to be little more an excuse to cast Myers, who at 23 hardly looks old enough to be taking care of anybody).
The unevenness of the whole enterprise suggests the adult cast members were given a fair amount of freedom to ad-lib. Black abbreviates words or adds meaningless syllables to them as the spirit moves him, while Jennifer Coolidge spouts her own more adult brand of nonsense in the small role of a man-hungry school principal who falls for one of the “villagers”.
There are moments when A Minecraft Movie comes close enough to total absurdity to evoke Alice Through The Looking Glass, founded on the equally abstract game of chess. But Hess and company haven’t managed to use the building blocks at their disposal to construct anything that holds up.
A Minecraft Movie is released in cinemas on April 3
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