By I don’t think I need to try to explain to you, dear reader, what Minecraft is. You may not know exactly what it is, but you know about it. It’s one of those franchises, such as Pokémon, that has become so prevalent in modern-day pop culture that even if you’ve never engaged with it whatsoever, you’re aware of the general concept. And, much like any franchise that exists in our modern-day pop culture environment, it needs to be mined for every last ounce of profit. Hence, A Minecraft Movie.
Okay, that may be a bit unfair to just call A Minecraft Movie a product that exists for profit. I mean… it is, but at the very least, not every IP that gets turned into a movie has to be a soulless endeavor. Just look at Barbie and how that movie went above and beyond what anyone was expecting a movie about Barbie to be. On the flip side, don’t go into A Minecraft Movie expecting anything revelatory or meaningful.
This is a movie made solely to make money, with very little creativity in its blood. It’s a movie that, at points, doesn’t even feel like it was real. It was a fever dream of an experience, and one that was entertaining in the moment, but rarely because of anything that actually happened in the film.
A Minecraft Movie
Director: Jared Hess
Release Date: April 4, 2025 (Theatrical)
Rating: PG
I think it’s best to put my theatrical viewing experience into perspective for this review. Normally, I would just dive right into a plot synopsis, but because of how barebones and generic the story of A Minecraft Movie is, it hardly matters.
So, I went to see this movie with a group of friends. We usually get together to see kids’ movies just to make fun of them. For example, we saw Dog Man and The Garfield Movie and had a good laugh at those, but those experiences were nothing compared to this one. When we saw those two movies, the theaters were pretty empty, and most people sat quietly. Not so with A Minecraft Movie. The theater was completely full, with children and teenagers going wild even before the movie began. Teenagers were standing up and screaming at people to clap, children were waving their Minecraft plushes in the air, and there were even two kids wrestling each other to the ground next to my seat. It was the wildest theatrical experience I’ve ever been to, and I was there opening night for Avengers: Endgame.
Now look, I know that Minecraft is popular, especially among children and teenagers, so I’m not going to hold it against the movie for how my theater behaved. If this was what the theatrical experience was normally like, then I would stop being a film critic. But it isn’t. In fact, it was kind of funny hearing people give a standing ovation for lines of dialogue that just existed for the memes. Seeing people completely lose it when Jack Black’s Steve yelled “CHICKEN JOCKEY” or watching people applaud like the president stepped into the room when Jack Black walked out like a disheveled mess and simply introduced himself. I don’t mind the memes, and lord knows I would be doing the same thing if I were a kid. I’m just stunned that it was for a movie that’s this mediocre.
Copyright: Warner Bros
A Minecraft Movie feels like the kind of movie that doesn’t actually exist. It’s the movie that is playing in the background of another movie when kids are just mindlessly watching something on TV. Its cast is comprised of characters whom I can honestly say I remember nothing about, and it’s been only a few days since I’ve seen the movie. I remember Jack Black for all of his obnoxious energy. I remember Jason Momoa solely because he plays a character called Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison. The rest? Absolutely nothing. I remember the roles they filled, like how Sebastian Hansen played a kid named Henry who is super creative but is misunderstood because of said creativity, and his sister Natalie, played by Emma Myers, who is a girl, and that’s about it.
Then again, the story is not the focus of A Minecraft Movie, which makes sense. Narrative has never really been a part of the series, except for a few odd examples here and there, like the surprisingly decent Telltale adaptation Minecraft Story Mode. Minecraft is a toolbox for players to build and create whatever they want. Sometimes it’s just a simple house with a little farm, and other times it’s a to-scale recreation of Minas Tirith from The Lord of the Rings. But movies need a story, and what’s here is some of the most bog-standard storytelling I’ve seen in quite some time.
From the very intro, where Steve explains how important two magical macguffins are, we know exactly what’s going to happen to them. When we hear about how Henry isn’t appreciated because of his creativity, we know exactly what’s going to happen with his arc. When Jason Momoa says he has financial trouble and is too arrogant to admit to his own faults, we know exactly how he’s going to become a better person by the end of this movie. Peppered throughout each of these arcs are random references to the game that will make outsiders feel confused and will be satisfying only to the people who have played the game for hundreds of hours.
Copyright: Warner Bros
I have to commend A Minecraft Movie at the very least for not bothering to try to explain its own logic. It assumes that you know exactly how its world operates and leaves its characters to just wing it as they go. Again, it matches with the tone set by the games, and while I can imagine parents or people who don’t know how Minecraft works being left in the dark, I don’t think it’s that big of an issue. Jack Black pretty efficiently explains the basics, and then the film just hits the ground running. Then it never stops running.
A Minecraft Movie is an exhausting film to watch. It barrels through scene to scene and joke to joke with no time for anything to land. Normally, I’m a fan of when a comedy blitzes through as many jokes as possible, but those jokes usually have some variety to break up the pacing. Even then, there are moments when the style of comedy shifts ever so slightly into another genre to liven up the pacing. Plus, movies tend to offer up a few dramatic moments here or there to let the story have some breathing room.
That’s not evident at all in A Minecraft Movie. The biggest joke you’ll get is just hearing Jack Black be loud. He’s so goddamn loud and obnoxious that he feels like he’s doing a parody of himself. The internet has soured on Jack Black as an actor in recent years, and he’s at his worst here. He’s playing Steve as Jack Black and doing things that Jack Black would do. If you don’t mind Jack Black’s over-the-top sense of humor, then I think you’ll be fine with his performance here, but because he’s so adamantly in your face, I can totally understand if a person can’t stand the film solely because of him. And as for the dramatic moments, they usually last for less than a minute, have zero impact because the characters are flatter than the soda that’s been sitting at my desk for two days, and then it’s back to the “comedy”!
Copyright: Warner Bros
Then there are the special effects, which are almost laughable at times. The amount of bluescreening here is to be expected, but some shots are done so poorly that I never once believed that this was a strange and fantastical world. I was always aware that this was a set. I was pretty certain that several scenes were filmed with not every cast member being together. It felt like a random stitching of scenes and dialogue to make a vague approximation of a story. I feel compelled to also mention that this movie had six writers working on it, which is kind of pathetic given that the film has lines that I’m pretty sure not even a teenager would include if they were tasked with writing the screenplay to A Minecraft Movie.
I can keep going on for ages about why I didn’t like A Minecraft Movie, but as I kept watching it, I kept thinking that I didn’t hate what I was seeing. Some moments made me laugh because of how strange they were, like whenever Jennifer Coolidge was on screen, trying to romance a villager from the game that wandered into the real world. I liked the first few scenes that were set in the real world, which really drove home just how miserable most of the cast and their small town life were. I even liked the climax, which looked laughably bad for the record, when the big villain kept on trying to dramatically defeat Steve when their methods of doing so never changed and were about as threatening as Bob the Killer Goldfish from Earthworm Jim. There were times when it embraced its stupidity that I enjoyed, but those moments didn’t have anything to do with Minecraft and were just good comedy bits.
I can tell that there was effort put into A Minecraft Movie. It was all cynical, assumed that people would only see it because of name recognition and therefore didn’t need a lot of effort put into it, but there was still effort. It wasn’t like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which was a passionless project that resulted in a lifeless experience. That film assumed audiences would eat anything up, and so it threw out the most tired of tropes and pretended to be deeper than it is. A Minecraft Movie doesn’t pretend to be something it isn’t. It knows it’s the equivalent of jingling keys in front of a four-year-old and owns up to it. Good for it, I suppose?
Copyright: Warner Bros
But people loved it. It got a standing ovation in my theater. A part of me doesn’t really know why, to be perfectly honest. A bit of me wants to think that it’s a weird sense of irony, like how people obsess over the minions from Despicable Me, and maybe that’s evident from teenagers who saw the trailers and assumed that it looked so bad they gaslit themselves into believing that it was good. But I didn’t get that sense from the children. They genuinely liked it, and even if it’s not the kind of family movie I like nowadays, I can’t deny that I watched movies that were considered brain rot when I was a kid. Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over. Shark Tales. Hoodwinked!. These were all terrible movies, but I watched them regardless and loved every minute of them.
I think that A Minecraft Movie is that exact same experience for this generation. It’s brain rot, but it’s entertaining in a way that will define a generation, be swiftly forgotten about in a few months, and then remembered with rose-tinted nostalgia even if it’s a movie that never learns to shut up and is entirely self-reliant on memes to make itself memorable that will become dated in a few weeks. At the very least, it doesn’t pretend to be something it isn’t. It knows it isn’t good and doesn’t care at all. Yay?
