A Minecraft Movie

Over the past decade or so, the bar for kiddie-brand-exploiting cinema has risen unexpectedly high. Both The LEGO Movie and Barbie utilised cool writing-directing talent to push meta self-knowingness to new levels, delivering some great jokes and songs while also saying something meaningful. How do you follow that? For A Minecraft Movie, as its definite-article-avoiding title suggests, the answer is to not even bother trying.

This isn’t to say it’s lacking in energy. It is loud in all senses, from the hideous hot pink of Jason Momoa’s tasselled leather jacket to the over-emphatic, pantomimey delivery of every single Jack Black line. Its brisk running time is rammed with garish, square-ish action, taking in such nonsense as a B-52’s-soundtracked aerial chase scene involving fireball-spitting squid balloons, and a wrestling match in which Momoa fights a baby zombie riding a chicken.

The visual equivalent of being pelted with boiled sweets.

Director Jared Hess brings a bit of his Napoleon Dynamite slacker-geek vibe to the real-world scenes, which are set in the hyper-quirky small town of Chuglass. Meanwhile, the cinematic reskinning of the inherently blocky, graphically challenged video-game biome is done as well as you could possibly imagine, though it would be a push to describe anything you see on Momoa and co’s adventures as “beautiful”. The film might be best described as the visual equivalent of being pelted with boiled sweets. Square boiled sweets.

In terms of story and character — you know, the important stuff — A Minecraft Movie really can’t be arsed. Its central MacGuffin is described in an interminable prologue as “a cool thingy”, while there’s no effort to contextualise its world in the way, for example, the LEGO and Barbie worlds were inventively presented in relation to ours. It’s just there and, like, whatever, dude. Aside from a forgettable and terribly dubbed final number, its songs are half-baked jingles. And its protagonists are little more than weary archetypes: the bro-dude moron (Momoa, on his continuing fashion-disaster mission), the nerdy-but-creative kid (Sebastian Hansen), the responsible older sibling-turned-kick-ass girl (Emma Myers), the brassy sidekick (Danielle Brooks), and Jack Black (er, Jack Black).

There is at least some evident fan-appreciation, such as a cameo by a crown-wearing pig (in tribute to YouTuber Technoblade, who died of cancer at the age of 23). But neither this, nor the fact that its half-arsedness is presented as a comedic choice — like when shabby infant-school plays wink at their parent-filled audience — get it off the hook. Ironically, this blockbuster is more bust than block.