Jack Black, Jason Momoa, and Sebastian Hansen in A Minecraft Movie. Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures
About halfway through A Minecraft Movie, I started thinking about how nice it was to have Jack Black making films again. Then, I caught myself. Black hasn’t exactly been absent from our screens: Last year he had the megahit Kung Fu Panda 4 and the megaflop Borderlands, and the year before that, he had The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which made more than a billion dollars. Those were, of course, voice performances, but somewhere in there he also starred in the live-action comedy Dear Santa, which I didn’t see but heard was abysmal. (He was nominated for a Razzie for it, so who knows, maybe it’s a masterpiece.)
But A Minecraft Movie, based on the popular Mojang Studios sandbox video game, showcases Black’s energy in a way that even some of his bigger animated hits haven’t managed. In it, he plays Steve, a man who spent his childhood dreaming of becoming a miner. When he finally gets the chance later in life, he digs up two glowing mysterious artifacts — “this thingie, and that cool thingie” — which send him into another dimension where he can build things with a wave of his hand. And he does so, creating his own little insular utopia made up of block-shaped objects. But now it’s all in danger of being destroyed by Malgosha (Rachel House), leader of the Nether, a dark dimension devoid of joy and creativity.
The game’s simple concept becomes the film’s silly premise, and Black is just the man to sell it to us. He’s the kind of guy who can yell, “Don’t fall for it, Gar Gar, that baby’s got the heart of a demon!” and “First we mine! Then we craft! Let’s minecraft” with such fervor that he somehow makes the words feel thoroughly sincere and thoroughly ironic — the greater his enthusiasm, the greater the absurdity. His sparkplug presence has a similarly incongruous power. He physically charges into each line, each gesture, each action as if it’s the most important thing that has ever happened in human history. He is mainstream cinema’s poet laureate of overreaction.
The particular charm of A Minecraft Movie lies in the way that it combines Black’s deranged vitality with those of his co-stars, particularly Jason Momoa as a has-been gamer and ’80s refugee still living off his past arcade triumphs. Momoa’s Garrett “the Garbage Man” Garrison makes for an endearing contrast with Steve. His delusional machismo can’t quite match Steve’s galactic, single-minded confidence. For all his bluster, Garrett secretly understands he’s pathetic, and when we meet him he’s about to be evicted from the dust-covered ruin of a video-game store he owns in the dead-end town of Chuglass, Idaho. He winds up in the world of Minecraft after befriending a machine-obsessed young newcomer named Henry (Sebastian Hansen), who leads the two of them to the mines. Close on their heels are Henry’s older sister, Natalie (Emma Myers), and Dawn (Danielle Brooks), a local real-estate agent who also runs a traveling zoo out of her car. Soon they’re all marveling at and running for their lives from rectangular shrub zombies and sneering piglin warriors while learning how to build giant square things.
Look, this is a silly film. Which is exactly what it should be. A Minecraft Movie was directed by Jared Hess, who burst onto the scene with the indie hit Napoleon Dynamite more than two decades ago and then followed it up with the luchador comedy Nacho Libre (also starring Black). Hess has continued to make movies, though his work has never quite matched the glories of those earlier pictures, which at the time prompted some to compare him (erroneously) to Wes Anderson. But he has just the right sensibility for this film, because he can infuse sweetness into his unseriousness.
That’s a harder task than it at might first seem. It would be insane to try and turn a feature adaptation of Minecraft into something dark and gritty and ambitious, though I’m sure somebody pitched that idea along the way. It would be similarly insane to turn the whole thing into a complete joke; the fanbase is too devoted, and the fates of multiple international corporations hang in the balance. So, Hess & Co. (there are five credited screenwriters on this movie, and I assume plenty of uncredited ones also took a whack at it) opt for a tongue-in-cheek reverence for the source that captures the playful vibe of the game itself. It feels like a small miracle that the resulting film is so funny, lively, and light on its feet.
