A MINECRAFT MOVIE - Mark Reviews Movies

A Minecraft Movie, Warner Bros. Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 3, 2025

It's tough to imagine anyone wanting to play "Minecraft" as a result of watching A Minecraft Movie, unless people want to understand all of the references to the video game within director Jared Hess' movie. The article that starts the title is probably appropriate, since this doesn't seem to be a faithful adaptation of the game, so much as it's some freewheeling comedy and a formulaic plot placed inside the world of the hugely popular game.

The most telling thing, then, is that the movie is funnier before the story becomes confined within that digital, boxy world and its assorted realms, dimensions, and secrets. It must be difficult to adapt a game that's basically a loop of doing the same things over and over, with some cosmetic variations, into a fully functioning story, so the team of five screenwriters here might have been wise to restrain that cycle within the most obvious bit of plotting possible. Wisdom doesn't equal imagination, unfortunately, and in a world where supposedly anything is possible, we should at least be offered some degree of imagination.

The funny stuff is more about these invented characters, who find themselves transported into "the Overworld," the huge sandbox of the game's first and main locale. Just to be clear, the video game itself doesn't actually exist in the story of this movie, which makes the story's restrictions even stranger. Without the limitations of needing to follow the rules and cycles of the game for some kind of consistent meta-level logic, why don't the filmmakers give themselves even more freedom to play with the possibilities that this entire world, based on crafting anything one can imagine, affords them?

One of our heroes, amusingly, seems to exist simply to be part of the Overworld, since that character is the game's main one. He's Steve (Jack Black), who, as a kid, dreamed of becoming a miner. After spending decades as a bored and unfulfilled adult, Steve suddenly recalled his childhood ambition, entered the mine from his youth (getting past a grumpy miner who hasn't aged a day), and, after finding a glowing cube and a crystalline container for it, opened a portal to the Overworld.

Sometime later, another hero enters the picture. He's Garrett Garrison (Jason Momoa), a washed-up video game champion who hasn't seen a better day—or a change in fashion—since the 1980s. He now runs a retro video game shop in small-town Idaho. If Black is the kind of casting one would expect for the eccentric and goofy and likeable protagonist of a wacky video-game movie, Momoa might be funnier, simply because we don't expect the hulking action star to play such a loser with such self-effacement and silliness.

Actually, the two of those characters are the most effective and story-appropriate ones in the movie. The other three never quite find a reason to be here, except, perhaps, Henry (Sebastian Hansen), who's the young, brainy, and outcast kid that all the kids in the audience, who will know every reference to the game before they even arrive on-screen, can imagine themselves being.

He and his older sister Natalie (Emma Myers) have moved to the town after the death of their mother, and nothing about them, their relationship, or their tragic circumstances matters as soon as they enter the Overworld, too. Somehow, even less than that matters about the fifth protagonist, a real estate agent with a bunch of side jobs named Dawn (Danielle Brooks), who ends up in the cubic dimension because she somehow knows more information about Henry's actions and whereabouts than his older sister and legal guardian.

The point is that none of this matters, and it shows. The purpose of the movie is to fill it with as much "Minecraft" as possible—from the world, to the characters and creatures within it, to those other realms, to the multiple buildings and items that can be constructed using the game's main mechanics. Here, Steve teaches the four newcomers the ropes that they haven't learned by accident when he shows up to help them fight off some zombies and skeleton.

Those monsters, by the way, show up at night, but the real villains are a group of anthropomorphic pigs, called "piglins" and led by the wicked sorceress Malgosha (voice of Rachel House). She wants the magical cube—an orb from the perspective of a world that's already made up of cube—for some evil plan or other, and while there technically is a lot more to the mythology and plotting of this narrative, it definitely feels as if there's nothing else to explain. Everything about the movie fits into a familiar routine, even having some of the Overworld enter the real world (giving Jennifer Coolidge some amusing moments as a woman who falls for a blocky villager).

The movie certainly looks like the game come to life, albeit with better visual effects than the game's pixelated graphics, and the decision to approach the material as a comedy first and foremost is likely the correct one. A Minecraft Movie, though, is so bland in terms of its narrative and characters that its few clever and imaginative touches aren't enough to propel it beyond its formulaic trappings.

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