About halfway through “A Minecraft Movie”, a CGI pig threatens Jack Black’s Steve, unironically warning he will “unalive” him unless he hands over an Orb that would let the pigs take over the Overworld. While death threats aren’t new in action and adventure movies, there’s something not quite right about online vocabulary designed only to get past TikTok’s strict community guidelines seeping into dramatic speech in such a frank and decontextualized way. But that’s emblematic of Minecraft as a whole, a movie so catered to a generation whose attention span has been utterly fried by endless scrolling that from scene to scene it genuinely felt like I was rotting on my For You page.
The movie bounces around like a garish pinball machine with the pacing of a lightning bolt to the heart. Characters say random things, do random things, state every thought they are feeling at an elevated volume and are generally just annoying. The whole thing feels almost MadLibs-ian. Nether’s Got Talent? A traveling zoo run by a real estate agent out of her car? Steve breaking into song one too many times? What the hell, sure. As a whole, the film seems game for just about anything, often to its own silly detriment. Each scene feels specifically designed to violently grasp the viewer’s attention, as if the movie feels it’s in danger of losing its audience at any given moment.
Jack Black’s Steve is probably the closest thing the movie has to a lead, offering an extended introductory monologue and quarterbacking the driving plot developments, yet Black has never been quite as annoying as he is here. The character is modeled after Black himself, adopting the Tenacious D persona that has permeated public consciousness thanks to Black’s usually natural charm. Jason Momoa, whose character has some sort of odd rivalry with Steve, is given the chance to flex (no pun intended) his acting skills and natural charisma, with the script adding an extra layer of nuance more than afforded to Black. As for the roles played by the rest of the cast, which includes Wednesday breakout Emma Meyers and Oscar Nominee Danielle Brooks, well, the five(!) credited writers seem to have bitten off more than they can chew.
None of this is to say there aren’t some endearing qualities. There are — they’re just few and far between. Jennifer Coolidge’s school principal character was the most consistently funny of the cast, offering a side plot that I would genuinely enjoy as a 10-episode series. The CGI and design work is also frankly impressive, successfully translating Minecraft’s signature blocky style to the real world without losing much of what makes it so aesthetically pleasing in the first place. Director Jared Hess, whose Napoleon Dynamite looks vaguely like Hamlet in comparison, builds a first act funny enough that when the film devolves into chaos the chaotic creative spirit feels like overkill.
Underneath the surface, I can’t help but dread the fact that Minecraft heralds the beginning of a new wave of films, one made with Generation Alpha as the priority. If this is what it takes to get kids to movie theaters, then so be it, but I just wish it wasn’t such a stark reminder of why they have such a hard time sitting still and paying attention in the first place.
