It's usually easy to spot a flop from a distance. A Minecraft Movie, based on the perennially popular 2011 video game, has many of the telltale signs.
With five screenwriters credited (often a sign of a patchwork film with too many cooks in the kitchen), the film has the look of a Super Bowl commercial or Saturday Night Live sketch. It is full of stars apparently past their prime (in this case Jack Black and Jason Momoa) mucking about in front of a green screen, pandering to the young fans of a piece of intellectual property they've potentially never interacted with.
Usually, in these sorts of scenarios, you end up with something like 2024's Borderlands, a video game adaptation so soulless and painfully unfunny it's not even fun to mock it. While many bad films are made with love, sequels, spinoffs and big-budget adaptations often make the artform feel inert because they are produced with so little heart that they might as well have been generated by AI.
But here's the thing: I actually liked A Minecraft Movie. I'm as surprised as you are. This is not a disaster. Not by a mile. In fact, for most of its duration, it's downright charming and, in parts, had me laughing out loud.
If the film has only one heart powering it, it probably belongs to director Jared Hess. The American filmmaker found fame in 2004 with Napoleon Dynamite, following that up with 2006's Nacho Libre. The latter was his first collaboration with Black, and features the same comic and aesthetic sensibility as A Minecraft Movie.
Hess's career has been largely middling since, with subsequent films failing to resonate with audiences. It's a shame it's taken him so long to start making children's films, because this and 2024's Thelma the Unicorn prove he has a style and sense of humour better fit for Saturday morning cartoons than midnight movies.
Minecraft the video game has no particular story or characters – it's an open world in which players can build, interact and explore. To overcome that obstacle, the film follows the Jumanji model, treating it not as a game, but as an Oz-like universe. Black (also the star of Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and its sequel) plays Steve, a man from Earth who thrives so much in that universe that he decides to never leave – hiding the only key between worlds under his bed.
Years later, the key is bought in a storage auction by Garrett Garrison (Jason Momoa), a once-famous video game champion whose life is in shambles. He befriends a local orphan boy and her sister, and together with their landlord, they are transported to the world of Minecraft.
The cube-based world is brightly and affectionately well-animated, full of block-ish people and animals that move like Jim Henson creations. The story is as simple as you can expect – they have to fix the broken key and return home – but it's never boring. Its world is rich and inviting, even if the characters aren't particularly vivid.
Black, who also starred in the successful adaptation of Super Mario Bros. as Bowser, no longer attempts to create characters, instead relying on his over-the-top sing-songy shtick and established persona. He's practically a children's cartoon character at this point, even without the green screen. These films are his home now, and here he shall remain. At least Hess understands how to use him.
The secret weapon here is Jennifer Coolidge (The White Lotus), who plays the brother and sister's school vice principal. She gives the film a Mel Brooks/David Zucker energy, popping in one liners such as "he's not finished, I think he's Swedish" that got me to chuckle more than once.
Parents, rejoice. Of all the movies that your kids are going to drag you along to this summer, this one will go down easy.
A Minecraft Movie is now in cinemas across the Middle East
