It is with a sense of incredulity that I find myself writing a review of A Minecraft Movie, which is a huge blockbuster hit.
I saw it in a theater filled with rows of boys from preteen through late teens, all of whom applauded at the end. I didn’t applaud at the end, because the movie is terrible. Though unfortunately, it isn’t even bad enough to be interesting.
A Minecraft Movie is tired, perhaps because this overworked material has been in development in Hollywood since 2014, with innumerable writers and directors trying to make something movie-like out of it. It’s got crappy cut-rate CGI that looks like all the other crappy cut-rate CGI that’s been shoved in our faces for decades. There are a bunch of dull characters having dull adventures, and shit-tons of voice-over exposition that goes on so long that it becomes hallucinatory. You wonder if you’ve been sitting in the theater for hours listening to Jack Black explain about how he’s a goofball named Steve who wants to be a miner but no one in the oppressive small town of Chuglass, Idaho, will let him pursue his creative dream. (Who has a creative dream to be a miner?) But then he breaks into a mine and pickaxes out some damn thing that propels him into the fantastical Overworld where he can create anything he imagines as long as it’s cube-shaped and so on and so on, until the opening credits finally appear and you realize with a jolt of horror that the movie has only just begun.
A Minecraft Movie is just as tired as Jack Black, playing Steve, appears to be. A dull-eyed graybeard now, he’s doing exactly the same schtick he’s done since playing a fanatical young live wire with the kinetic quality of a wildly bouncing ball in High Fidelity (2000) and School of Rock (2003).
Jason Momoa is also going through his paces playing Garrett “the Garbageman” Garrison, a formerly celebrated gaming champion fallen on hard times,…
Auteur: Eileen Jones
