A Minecraft Movie Sounds Like A Mess That Might Not Be Terrible

A Minecraft Movie comes out this weekend and early reviews are all over the place. Some are calling the gaming adaptation starring Jack Black and Jason Momoa a nonsensical disaster, while others think it’s not actually that bad. Microsoft’s Hollywood debut might feel like naked IP exploitation but it’s not necessarily the mess the initial trailer suggested.

Out April 4, A Minecraft Movie focuses on the game’s iconic master crafter Steve, played by Black, on an adventure with eclectic societal misfits Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison (Jason Momoa), Henry (Sebastian Hansen), Natalie (Emma Myers) and Dawn (Danielle Brooks) as they try to find a way back home from the bizarre, blocky world they’ve become trapped in. Does the mashup of Minecraft jokes and fish-out-of-water oddball comedy succeed?

Entertainment Weekly’s Jordan Hoffman seemed to think it was fine but that Black was a weak link. “His opening voiceover has some of the audible panic of someone asked to watch after someone else’s kids, laying on the excitement really thick in the hopes they don’t notice Mommy and Daddy have stepped away for a few minutes, “ he writes.

Mashable’s Kimber Myers was more upbeat, though she conceded that probably nobody watching the movie is there for the story. “Parents will likely find this film more entertaining than listening to their kids talk about Minecraft for the equivalent amount of time (101 minutes, for the record),” she writes. “A Minecraft Movie might also provide a deeper understanding of the universe (Minecraft’s, not the real one) for those who haven’t experienced it firsthand before. It’s a good primer for the game that never feels like homework.”

The creative conundrum at the center of A Minecraft Movie is how to convert a game about freestyle play, exploration, and building into a coherent 90-minute spectacle, and the sense you start to get from reading many of the current reviews is that nothing that happens in the film is that impactful, but neither is it a drag, and often it’s pleasant enough. “The limitless creativity inherent in the game hasn’t been fully replicated in the movie, which is designed to expand its brand dominance,” writes Brian Tallerico for RogerEbert.com. “However, there’s just enough inspired heroism in this flick to make people who put the game down years ago circle back to it and build something new.”

Writing for The New York Times, Brandon Yu said that much of the film has “a camp quality of so-dumb-it’s-sort-of-fun.” For Jacob Oller at The AV Club, the lack of any coherent story arc earned the film a C-. IndieWire gave it a similar grade, with critic David Erhlich writing, “Fleet pacing, vivid colors, and a poppy Mark Mothersbaugh score do what they can to paper over the film’s prefab nature, but even kids — especially kids — will pick up on the disconnect between what they can make in Minecraft (anything they can imagine) and what Hess has made of Minecraft (nothing they haven’t seen before).”

But Johnny Oleksinski at The New York Post wasn’t having it. “It’s the kind of formulaic brand-extension tale a writer could pitch while in a coma,” he writes. It only gets more brutal from there, as he continues, “‘To hope, to dream, to create is to suffer,’ the baddie says. She left out ‘to watch.’” Ultimately, A Minecraft Movie doesn’t sound anywhere near as bad a video-game-turned-movie as last year’s Borderlands, but it also doesn’t seem set to have the same juice as The Super Mario Bros. Movie or the first few Sonics. Like most of the critics who reviewed it, however, I’ll ultimately be deferring to my kids’ takes when we see it this weekend.