Millions of people are playing the video game Minecraft right now, as in right now while you’re reading this sentence. They’re building inventions with the whack of a hammer. Combine sand and gunpowder and thwack, you’ve made a brick of TNT. In Minecraft’s pixelated Overworld, everything is shaped like a box, from the trees to the bees, and players invent their own adventures — there’s no princess imprisoned in a castle. The game’s blocky bizarro aesthetic has given it global recognition; its free-range exploration on a terrain the size of Neptune has earned it over $3 billion.
Hence Hollywood hurling a brick of cash at making “A Minecraft Movie.” Hold up: Not “The Minecraft Movie”?
Exactly. That humble title acknowledges the hubris of forcing one story onto a game that’s popular exactly because it doesn’t have characters or a plot. It would be just as apropos to call this “Jared Hess’ Minecraft Movie.” Hess, the director, combines the spirit of his 2004 hit “Napoleon Dynamite” with the game and thwack, he’s made a solid comedy constructed of his own touchstones: tater tots, ’80s kitsch and wannabe alpha males in a joystick-measuring contest.
The movie starts in fictional Chuglass, Idaho, the “potato chip capital of America,” where a giant tuber mascot looms over the town. Before the opening credits wrap, a restless doorknob salesman, Steve (Jack Black), barges into the Overworld through a magic portal, teaches the audience the gameplay and gets imprisoned by the villain, a sorceress pig named Malgosha (voiced by Rachel House) who hates art and innovation. When one of her enslaved piglets colors a picture with crayons, she turns him into a pork chop.
Hess’ take on Minecraft is essentially a meathead version of “The Wizard of Oz.” Four ragtag Idaho acquaintances blunder into the Overworld and beg Black’s wizard-bearded blowhard for help returning home. Yes, Toto, there’s a cubist dog, too, as well as a young audience conduit, Henry (Sebastian Hansen), an intelligent boy with a charming lisp; his anxious older sister Natalie (Emma Myers); their Realtor Dawn (Danielle Brooks); and a second braggart, Garrett (Jason Momoa), who was once awesome at ’80s arcade games but cannot fathom Minecraft’s no-rules autonomy. Upon arrival, Garrett marches up to a sheep and expects it to tell him what to do — a giveaway that he’s a noob. “My wrists aren’t what they used to be,” he whimpers.
Momoa has only one note to play but he turns it into a keytar solo. The muscle man is a precise physical comedian: With his fringed leather jacket and bleached mane, Momoa’s Garrett looks and acts like the hair-metal version of the Cowardly Lion. He’s so deluded about what sounds cool that he’s nicknamed himself “The Garbage Man.” In an early scene, Garrett drives around sobbing to the Skid Row ballad “I Remember You” and you wonder if Hess himself is deluded about what sounds cool to today’s fifth-graders. Is Skid Row as quaint as Benny Goodman?
Similarly, the script (credited to too many writers to name) assumes the children in the audience will care about a romantic subplot in which one of Minecraft’s nonverbal, nonplayer villager characters accidentally winds up in Idaho on a date with a divorcée played by Jennifer Coolidge. Whenever the action cuts away to Coolidge’s lonely heart making goo-goo eyes at a mute, it feels like a clunky distraction. But these scenes are short and goofy and forgivable since they don’t take up too much running time. Back in the game, there are dozens more of these identical villagers standing on the sidelines. With their heavy eyebrows and square jaws, they look like a fretful phalanx of Martin Scorseses reluctantly conceding that the movie is pretty fun.
Jack Black, however, is a feat of engineering: a round peg who fits perfectly into this square-centric land. The wicked Malgosha sneers that he’s a “roundling.” A human cannonball is more like it. Black bowls through the movie like the king of the sandbox, the lord of the playground, rallying the rest of us to join him on a quest that he’s made up on the spot. He was born to pose backlit by a pyre of flaming zombies and does so here, with the hot wind tickling his locks perfectly.
Half the time, Black’s dialogue is just announcing what we’re looking at, from diamond swords to flying hot air balloons that look like goth squids. But it’s the gleam in his eyes, the gusto in his delivery, that makes every line zing. Presenting his personal recipe for flame-roasted chicken — one brick of lava, one bird — he breaks out into a giddy song: “La-la-la-lava! Ch-ch-ch-chicken!” It’s the kind of dumb jingle that gets stuck in your head for a week. You’ll be equal parts annoyed and delighted at its existence, while giving full kudos to the production design team that fashioned a Picasso-esque drumstick for Black to wave around.
As a child of the ’90s, I should be salty that the alt-comedy superstar now belongs to grade schoolers who only know him from the “Kung Fu Panda” movies. But if Black hooks kids on the habit of going to the movies, I’m happy to let a younger generation play with my toys.
“Creativity in this world is the key to survival,” Steve insists. Now, he’s serious. The movie, like the game, is founded on the thrill of discovery; whenever it leaves the land of pixels, incuriosity reigns supreme — jadedness is the worst enemy of all. At Henry’s school, a teacher swats down the boy’s interest in science in favor of ranting about his dismal salary. “My dad says math has been debunked,” a classmate insists.
Brains, artistry, ingenuity — these qualities matter even when they seem impractical and strange. One of Minecraft‘s real-life gamer heroes, a YouTuber named Technoblade, spent months figuring out how to grow 500 million pixelated potatoes before dying of cancer at age 23. He and Hess share a silly, marvelous and memorable commitment to spuds and, as a salute, Technoblade’s avatar, a pig in a bejeweled crown, has a cameo in the movie. “A legend,” Black beams. He’s serious about that, too.
