“A Minecraft Movie” flint and stole my sweet and precious time
When the Lumière Brothers opened the first movie theaters in turn-of-the-century Paris, do you think they could have seen this coming? When George Méliès wrote and directed “A Trip to the Moon” in 1902, do you think it occurred to him that we could end up here? When Victor Flemming pioneered color cinema with “The Wizard of Oz,” do you think he knew it could be used in this way? Will God ever forgive us? These are the questions that I asked myself while I deposited my 3-D glasses and exited the theater for “A Minecraft Movie” on opening night.
Based on the video game of the same name, “A Minecraft Movie” was released nationwide on April 4, 2025, a date I will never forget. The theater where I saw this was absolutely packed to the gills. Every demographic was represented. If you have been on TikTok or Twitter during this film’s release, you have likely been bombarded with memes of Jack Black just saying things from the game in his Jack Black-y voice, along with videos of people going insane in their theaters for certain lines from the trailer. However, it is a completely different experience when you are actually in the theater and get to experience firsthand a crowd screaming “CHICKEN JOCKEY” followed by rapturous applause. There were moments during my theatrical experience that were so euphoric I was brought back to my 2019 screening of “Avengers: Endgame.” It was ethereal. All that being said, this movie is absolutely awful.
This movie definitely has a “so-bad-it’s-good” quality about it, which is helped by the atrocious story. This movie had nine writers, and I have little confidence that any of them had a strong idea for how to make a story out of “Minecraft.” It follows Steve, played by Jack Black, who has lived in “The Overworld” for years, building whatever his imagination allows. On that, I must say that this performance from Black was probably one of his worst, no matter how much it pains me to say. He seemed disingenuous, going through the Jack Black motions with none of the heart. I cannot say I blame him for not giving it his all with “A Minecraft Movie,” but his performance was just one of the aspects that unfortunately made the movie feel like a feature-length digital short on “Saturday Night Live.”
The rest of the story is about four others who are transported to “The Overworld,” Jumanji-style. They include two orphaned siblings, a real-estate agent and a washed-up gamer from the 1980’s. Together, they all work with Steve to save “The Overworld” from total annihilation by creatures from “The Nether.” If you are not familiar with the “Minecraft” game, you might notice a glaring problem: why should we care about “The Overworld?” What is our personal investment in this blocky world and why should we, or any of the characters for that matter, care about what happens to it? The film never answers these questions, and it results in the film’s stakes feeling terribly low. Would it not make much more sense for the antagonists to target the human world? They establish that there is a portal between “The Overworld” and the human world, so would it not make for a more engaging plot if the world that we, the audience, live in, was in danger?
The dialogue is also notably terrible. Everyone has mocked lines from the trailer, but they sound worse in context. The entire film is Jack Black pointing out things from the game and just saying their names out loud, such as “FLINT AND STEEL” and the aforementioned “CHICKEN JOCKEY.” At one point a character literally says “unalive,” and it was about then that I took off my 3-D glasses to ponder the choices I had made that led to that moment. If you were looking for something to distract from the terrible story and embarrassing dialogue, the effects are not much better. Some CGI looked alright and pretty convincing at times, but there were certain shots that looked so bad I could have sworn I saw them in “Kung-Pow: Legend of the Fist.”
“A Minecraft Movie” is truly bad. It is cringeworthy, cliched, predictable, boring, ugly and embarrassing. I loved every minute of it. While the movie was indeed a true piece of commercial garbage, I couldn’t help but have fun at the movies with my friends, laughing and cheering right along with the excitable audience. In the same way that people congregate en masse in the wee hours of the night to watch films like “The Room” or “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” people went to see “A Minecraft Movie” to laugh and have a good time. A good time was indeed had by all, and despite the movie’s abject failure as a film, it succeeds at being a great meme, as well as a future cult classic.
