LOS ANGELES, April 2 (UPI) -- In A Minecraft Movie, in theaters Friday, Jack Black and Jason Momoa work overtime to sell the film's overly complicated premise. Their admirable efforts are no match for a disastrous script.
Based on the popular video game, the movie opens with a pre-title montage that feels longer than an in-game tutorial. Steve (Black) explains the rules of Minecraft and how the live-action and CG-animated adaptation will work: Steve discovered a portal to Overworld in the Chuglass, Idaho mine shaft, opened by the Orb of Dominance and Earth Crystal.
In the Overworld, Steve can build anything as a series of blocks by imagining it. Everything in Overworld is cube-shaped, even people and animals.
But there is also a dark world called The Nether, ruled by Malgosha (voice of Rachel House, creature performer Allan Henry) and her Piglin soldiers. Steve sends his dog Dennis back to the real world to hide the orb so no one else stumbles into the Nether.
All of this requires Black to perform alone on a stage and make viewers believe he is interacting with cubed creatures and building structures. Black is up to the task of riffing in front of a green screen, acting up and dancing with his expressions of childlike wonder and manic gyrations.
The plot also requires spending some time in the real world, which is less believable in this movie than the Overworld. Enter Momoa, who plays Garrett Garrison, a 1989 video game champion now struggling to keep his gaming shop open. Garrett buys Steve's old storage unit with the orb and crystal in it.
Meanwhile, siblings Natalie (Emma Myers) and Henry (Sebastian Hansen) are introduced as they move to Chuglass to honor their late mother's dying wish. The addition is abrupt, and after all of the exposition dumps about the Overworld and Garrett's video game career, all Natalie gets is a line where she reminds Henry their dead mother asked them to move to this town.Henry is still in high school and Natalie is hired to run social media for a potato chip company. Bullies sabotage Henry's science class invention, which causes an accident all the way over at the factory while a gym teacher details all his financial woes to the class.
The film needs to demonstrate the world from which the characters are escaping, but "bullied teen" and "stressful job" are pretty basic. Get to Minecraft already!
Because Henry makes friends with Garrett at his store, the whole gang, including realtor Dawn (Danielle), use the orb to go to Overworld. Garrett hopes he can find treasure there to save his store.
Thematically, A Minecraft Movie is flimsier than its plot. Henry feels welcome in a world where he can create anything, but the script only plugged in one real-world incident to indicate he's unhappy in his circumstances.
Natalie has to grow up too fast to take care of her brother. She could be 18 or in her early 20s to have a corporate job, but the film never specifies. Myers is 23.
The characters are supposed to bring what they learned in Overworld back to the real world, but the movie never shows how that applies. Henry never compares building with Overworld blocks to any real-world building setbacks, and nothing in this journey informs Natalie learning to appreciate being a caretaker.
Steve and Garrett have lessons to learn that are just as arbitrary. Dawn doesn't even get an arbitrary moral.
An Overworld man also gets through the portal into the real world. He has two scenes with Henry's vice principal (Jennifer Coolidge) that do not explore the humor of a Minecraft character in the real world at all. They have a third scene that plays during the credits.
In addition, the film never convincingly looks like the actors are in a physical place. Superimposed backgrounds have existed since silent movies filmed actors in front of black curtains. Now, all the technology available in 2025 only makes it more glaring that Overworld is essentially a Zoom background for Black and Momoa.
Having humans in a world of blocks accentuates the disembodied nature of the visual effect. If they'd built even a five-foot patch of blocky grass, it would have helped smooth over the contrast.
Occasional recreations of video game activity are endearing. A brief scene of cube pandas is cute and seeing a cube of water splash is unique. The characters build structures and weapons, or carve away walls to reveal passageways.
Myers also gives sincere reactions, genuinely scared of the block creatures she meets. Momoa gives nonsense motivational talks with the intensity of his action heroes. Black remains the best at matching the absurdity of the exposition with the intensity of his delivery.
The Lego Movie and Barbie used their source material to tell stories about creativity and society. The Minecraft Movie feels like it has a mandate to replicate that, but did not get what either movie was actually doing.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
