Four misfits find themselves struggling with ordinary problems when they are suddenly pulled through a mysterious portal into the Overworld: a bizarre, cubic wonderland that thrives on imagination....
Remember when I was one of the only few sane people who didn’t completely rip apart Borderlands because it’s really just a mediocre botch-job that does nothing to distinguish itself from every other team-up story released within the past few decades or represent the franchise it’s apart of at its best? Yeah?
Well, I want to apply that similar mindset to “Minecraft”……but I can’t.
Suffice it to say, Jared Hess’s style does not work well on me; I’ve tried getting into Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre among his other projects but his idiosyncratic touch always seems to keep me at arms length; like a forcefield of ironic detachment that surrounds every piece with his name attached to it, the insistence on just doesn’t click. His directing has a very clear disconnect between its own seemingly quirky appeal and the games natural essence, misaligning and mistaking its layers of unnatural causality for charisma while bluntly dunking on arbitrary surrealism….and a part of me is annoyed by that because he actually seemed like a natural fit for this project.
I don’t know what’s more baffling about this presentation: seeing how quickly the video game physics and of this world quickly wear off and bore me to tears or the fact that even with that diluted absurdity, this complete oddity is so distinctly banal in flavor beyond all expectations.
To play a tiny bit of Devil’s Advocate, you could suggest that the production design is deliberately intended to look as cut-rate and bare-bones as possible, nodding to a joke we all know but doesn't seem clever enough to justify the ankle-deep execution. The laid-back and casual nature of the Minecraft world—a universe that thrives on unpretentious charm and simplicity—has regrettably been all but siphoned out to make room for a version of expressionism so artificial and processed that it feels more like a parody than an homage. I’m not saying all of the sets are terrible; they visually look the part, mimicking many of the famous landmarks and colorfully evoking the timeless memorabilia from the game but the gargantuan scope and scale of all that full-fledged freedom cannot be replicated here and for someone known for keeping and maintaining a strong understanding of physical space, Hess doesn't capture the tactility these environments carry.
Did I hope the cinematography had a stronger impact in anchoring the film? Perhaps. Among the various frames, only one shot stood out as somewhat captivating, while the others came off as quite plain or straightforward; the lo-fi aesthetic wrangles no charm out of these visuals and it’s made up mostly of hackneyed sequences drained of energy, with editing that barely held everything together and offered little momentum. The visual effects speak on their own, skirting the line between the uncanny valley to a mildly creepy extent while maintaining an otherwise faithful blocky design that only enhances that overall sense of disconnect, its tacky costuming is colorfully vibrant but otherwise dull, feeling like it could've been straight out of a high school play and while it might be considered a blessing that the 1hr 41min runtime wasn’t too condensed or stretched out beyond capacity, the duration wouldn’t have made this mind-numbing experience any more or any less aggravating, especially when the atonality is on a tightrope.
It is a literal roller coaster clown circus, further exacerbated by how breezily the pacing bum-rushes through every every sequence without affording them the necessary time to breathe or resonate. Again, for a runtime that clocks out only 19 minutes short of two hours, it wastes so much time on dead air. Additionally, the music got annoying pretty quickly in regards to the abrupt break-out-into-song montages; they’re both frequent and sudden. The inverse to that would be Mark Mothersbaugh’s sweeping, expansive musical score but even that is generic for adventure movie standards.
Long story short, the acting is pretty good; they’re having as much fun as they can but god, the characters they’re stuck with are so one-dimensional, it isn’t even funny. You could say I’m biased towards Jack Black but he was easily the best bit of this entire thing. I could call him the only one who’s life, charisma, and unhinged energy got me close to laughing at least once but really, it’s Black and Jason Momoa that are the only two concrete players here: they get the lions den of the screen time as the movie scrambles to give the rest of the cast anything substantial to do. Sebastian Hansen is stretched thin as the archetypical ‘special’ kid, Emma Myers and Danielle Brooks literally are dancing in limbo for minutes at a time and the less I mention Jennifer Coolidge, the better.
Need I mention the plain and patchy dialogue exchanges?
Five, count ‘em, FIVE separate screenplay credits are attached to this so one can only imagine the key-jangling chaos that ensued from the constant revolving door of half-baked ideas and unresolved plot threads while feeding off the disorderly scramble of so many conflicting creative voices being out of tune with one another. Even as someone who has a very vague memory of Minecraft’s characters, lore, environment and cultural carbon footprint in society, I know at its heart, it’s meant to be laidback and chill with a casual vibe and that could’ve been fine-tuned into a playful celebration of the source material’s ethos…..but that’s not what we get here. Instead, this narrative is the literal definition of brain-rot; the type of creative repetition where nothing stays novel enough to retain its luster, but the degree to which such a self-aware distancing trickles down into every aspect of this project only makes these failures of intention more remarkable; an utter oddity whose dopey jackassery left me utterly empty.
Yes, this movie is really REALLY stupid, like no-thoughts-head-empty kind of stupid and there’s barely a single block’s worth of depth between its dime-a-dozen parts being annoyingly predictable and erratically stripped down and recycled. Sure, its cohesive enough to give us a clear beginning, middle and end but there’s no spirit present in this brick-by-brick slog of humorless references, billionth-stupid puns and paper-thin plotting; the latter of which tries and fails to adapt every other kid adventure plotline in here built upon with a "lesson" about teamwork and self-discovery that's been done to death in every other family film and you’re practically robbed of any tension or stakes the instant it starts, thanks to its by-the-numbers approach. So much of the sanctity of the game is sacrificed — at best to move the plot forward, at worst for a cheap gag.
Probably the only thing this narrative actually has going for it is the overt commentary on how certain capitalist pigs can deform creative passion for the sake of complacency and control; in a day and age where even the most inoffensive thing is being filtered or dulled over, it’s somewhat reassuring seeing a picture like this tell us, ‘No, it’s okay to express yourself. You’ll never know when you might need it.’ Even the few instances where that very creativity gets questioned, it should’ve been a rather door-opening development on finding a healthy balance between real life strife with childlike wonder. Sucks that all that showboating and grandstanding about creativity immediately trips over the first hurdle because do you not see how hypocritical that feels: bragging and boasting how revolutionary just a little bit of thinking outside the box could do and you go and stuff that down the most derivative of formulas to present that in. Like, what the hell are y’all playing at?
Nothing actually gets built in a world centered around building anything you set your mind to. It is so surface level, constrained to the most formulaic of templates and it simply does not care.
And hey, here’s another case as to why Borderlands is better than this movie: at least it barely qualifies as an actual movie. Characters, settings, effects, costumes, basic plot structure, a style that actually vaguely resembles the game it’s based on; most of those features might be half-assed and crippled due to extensive reshoots and a severe lack of leadership but at least the finished product has a vaguely stronger resemblance to what it’s supposed to represent. This might be the more entertaining feature of the two but that’s only because Warner Bros. and their complete lack of self awareness insisted on conjuring up this failed recipe with every batch of seasoning they could find, not caring whether or it’s marinated or not.It doesn’t give two Chicken Jockey’s about nurturing creativity, freedom or balancing the two between the tear and grind of the real world; it’s only concern is expanding the brand dominance of its intellectual property whether it catches on or not……and that’s it.
Less a movie more than it is a commercial meant to be taken face value as another piece of loosely affiliated merchandise, one could make the argument this movie’s magic lies strictly in the moments and the margins between the lines of its derivative narrative, but even then, it's a stretch. Because "A Minecraft Movie" can’t justify itself through its overwrought style or nostalgia cannonballing.
