I had been sitting in an IMAX theater at AMC Waterfront for an hour and ten minutes, watching Steve and his gang of Idahoan misfits journey to the Woodland Mansion, when it happened.
Garrett, played by Jason Mamoa, stood before a blocky chicken in the pillagers’ wrestling ring while, to his utter fear, a crate lowered upon the chicken and deposited a baby zombie atop it. As Steve said his next line, everyone screamed along with him, “Chicken Jockey!”
The theater erupted in applause, many offering Jack Black a standing ovation for his masterful delivery. I must note the genius of the filmmakers not to have any dialogue in the thirty seconds following that line, surely knowing we wouldn’t be able to hear any of it over the cheering and hollering of these catharsis-stricken Gen Z moviegoers.
“A Minecraft Movie” follows Natalie, Garrett and Dawn and her brother Henry, four average townspeople from Idaho, as they enter a portal to the video game world of Minecraft. When their way back to the real world is destroyed, they enlist the help of Steve, played by Jack Black, who guides them to a Woodland Mansion where they can find the Earth Crystal — their only way back home.
These rounds of applause happened probably over 20 other times throughout the course of the movie, always after such well-written lines as “Water bucket release!” or “First we mine, then we craft. Let’s Minecraft!” It was probably the most fun I’ve ever had seeing a movie at the theater.
But I left the theater very ambivalent about the actual content of the film, largely because it’s nearly impossible to judge “A Minecraft Movie” on usual standards. Most patrons, like me, walked into the theater expecting to consume garbage — an hour and fifty minutes of clapping like a baby batting around its crib mobile — but there were still several portions of the film that worked very well because they leaned into this image of a “bad” movie.
Jack Black simply announcing the names of items and monsters in the game over and over and over again is, on paper, a terrible decision. Naming the Piglin army commander “General Chungus” and having him say he’s going to “unalive” Steve is a terrible decision. Having almost every minor conflict resolved within two minutes of it starting is a terrible decision.
But all these terrible decisions made the movie so enjoyable. The self-awareness this movie has regarding its sloppiness certainly does not absolve it of being a sloppy movie, but I have to recognize its merit as a hilarious, mindless comedy.
When I think of a “bad” moment in the movie or rewatch the scenes featured in the trailers that had me convinced this would get a 1.5 star average on Letterboxd, I remember myself laughing my ass off at these moments when I finally saw them on the big screen. This film embodies a horseshoe theory of comedic cinematography, where I can’t tell if these scenes are so awful that I had to assume they were ironically great or if they were just on such a higher level of comedy that I couldn’t comprehend the genius.
But even despite its impossible-to-decipher mix of garbage and gold, “A Minecraft Movie” had clear overarching flaws.
The women of this film were, unfortunately, very underutilized. Natalie and Dawn, who enter Steve’s overworld with Garrett and Dawn’s younger brother, Henry, quickly separate from the men after a Piglin ambush, and the two women make their way to the Woodland Mansion on their own. The only problem is that their B-plot journey was nowhere near as entertaining as the men’s and, frankly, felt unnecessary. While it’s great that Natalie and Dawn had the agency to do as they pleased in the Minecraft overworld without the guidance of Steve, they were not given the lines or the characterization to be as absurd and memorable as Jack Black or Jason Mamoa.
The film also frequently made up new stuff about the game of Minecraft. There are certain things, like the Orb of Dominance and the Earth Crystal — the links between our world and Minecraft’s — that are reasonable to make up for the sake of the plot. But several times throughout the movie, there would appear some random new item or enemy that the writers included for seemingly no real reason at all. But I suppose when Jack Black is sporadically breaking out into 30-second bouts of Minecraft-themed songs, game-to-film continuity is not exactly the most important thing to focus on.
It’s really very hard to judge this movie by the standards of other recent game adaptations, like “Five Nights at Freddy’s” or “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” because it is not serious in any way. You will leave that theater or turn off your TV, having laughed a lot but gained absolutely nothing at all. The only real “themes” in this movie are to be creative and to empathize with each other, and these morals are so ham-fisted and in-your-face that it’s hard to say that this movie really has a message at all.
In my 2-hour time at the theater, I laughed, I cheered, I watched four people leave the movie halfway through, and by the time I left after the post-credits scene — another genius-yet-terrible inclusion — I felt invigorated. Jack Black was amazing as the lead, Jennifer Coolidge was amazing in her small side plot — really, everything was amazing across the board. And yet, it was all a heaping load of nothing at the same time.
