Spoiler Space offers thoughts on, and a place to discuss, the plot points we can’t disclose in our official review. Fair warning: This article features plot details of A Minecraft Movie.
Though A Minecraft Movie is a structure built following other movies’ blueprints, it does boast a few jokes from its small server’s worth of screenwriters that subvert the expected beats of a kiddie blockbuster. Aside from the more specific strangeness emanating from the remnants of Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre director Jared Hess’ creativity, A Minecraft Movie also includes more directly satirical moments, like Steve (Jack Black) slapping away the hidden knives that the film’s weakened antagonist attempts to stab him with after the film’s climactic battle. This self-awareness doesn’t spread throughout the film, but one surreal storyline in particular remains consistently funny—culminating in a punchline foolishly hidden in the middle of its credits.
Playing the vocally divorced vice principal of the school that A Minecraft Movie‘s one kid character attends, Jennifer Coolidge gets laughs from the adults in the audience simply through how bizarre it is that her squinty, oblivious persona is ambling around this video game movie. Why she’s in the film at all is unclear. Aside from some expository bookends, A Minecraft Movie is uninterested in its human characters, taking place almost entirely in the video game’s Overworld. There are several world-threatening plots and well-worn heroes’ journeys going on in that blocky dimension. The film only cuts back to the real world a few times, following a Minecraft villager—who looks like those hyperreal 3D renders of SpongeBob characters, textured like an extreme close-up of loose elbow skin—who stumbles through the same portal that transported the film’s ensemble of humans out of Idaho.
Unlike pretty much every other video game character who, mid-movie, finds their way into the real world, the villager poses no threat to our world. In fact, he’s immediately hit by a car, driven by Jennifer Coolidge’s character. It is good, right, and moral for this abomination to be vehicularly manslaughtered, but he survives and—because his assailant is played by Coolidge—ends up on a candlelit dinner date with her.
The joke here, aside from the cosmic joke of attempting to make sense of this Dadaist dive into the deep end, is that the meaty monstrosities that are the Minecraft villagers can’t talk. They just sigh and hum, contemplating the sweet release of death that will eventually free them forever of their furry unibrows and Kilroy noses. This silence, of course, is played for laughs in Coolidge’s scenes, where the desperate woman appreciates the villager’s generosity as a listener. The bar truly is in hell for men. When the villager waggles his caterpillar brow at Coolidge’s veiled offer of sex, the Minecraft diehards surely must go wild in the theater aisles. This is what Minecraft is all about.
While these sequences are enjoyable reprieves from watching Jason Momoa and Jack Black dramaturgically arm wrestle for the role of class clown, they are still jarring asides from an otherwise hyper-conventional movie intent on pressing IP into a blockbuster mold. It’s almost as if the filmmakers heard The Studio‘s pitch for a Kool-Aid movie and subsequently determined to make an even more derivative version of that parodic one-size-fits-all screenplay. So, even though they don’t have anything at all to do with the goings-on of the film in question, and less to do with the subject matter of Minecraft, the violent-then-romantic interactions between an unrelated-to-the-plot vice principal and a beast from another world do threaten to steal one’s attention from the rest of the movie.
That makes it all the more upsetting that the payoff for this bit is saved until after the credits begin to roll. Anyone who would appreciate this odd gag—namely, White Lotus-watching adults conned into bringing their children to A Minecraft Movie—will be rushing their kiddies out of the theater as soon as possible. But then they would miss the reveal that, yes, this villager has learned to talk, and he sounds like Matt Berry.
The hyper-articulate favorite of enunciation aficionados has been tickling audiences with his exacting deliveries for years, and his casting as this fucked-up Conehead makes the telegraphed joke all the sweeter. Berry’s villager confronts Coolidge’s ex, taking him to task over how he treated the woman he’s been falling in love with ever since she turned him into roadkill with her Jeep Grand Cherokee. Though it may lead one to look incredulously around the theater for another person to confirm that this was really committed to film and included in A Minecraft Movie, it’s a beautifully weird idea to thread throughout an otherwise dizzying experience. That comedy darlings Coolidge and Berry share one brief moment of A Minecraft Movie, and that their small scene deals with post-divorce romance, is perhaps the most inexplicable part of this video game movie built around magic-wielding pigs and glowing orbs.
