A Minecraft Movie (dir. Jared Hess)

by Jack Martin | Apr 4, 2025

Certificate: PG

Running Time: 101 mins

UK Distributor: Warner Bros

UK Release Date: 4 April 2025

WHO’S IN A MINECRAFT MOVIE?

Jason Momoa, Jack Black, Emma Myers, Danielle Brooks, Sebastian Hansen, Rachel House, Jennifer Coolidge, Matt Berry, Kate McKinnon, Jemaine Clement

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Jared Hess (director), Chris Bowman, Chris Galletta, Gavin James, Hubbel Palmer and Neil Widener (writers), Jon Berg, Cale Boyter, Vu Bui, Roy Lee, Jill Messick, Jason Momoa, Mary Parent and Torfi Frans Ólafsson (producers), Mark Mothersbaugh (composer), Enrique Chediak (cinematographer), James Thomas (editor)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

A world of blocky creativity comes under threat…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON A MINECRAFT MOVIE?

Why, oh why, did I think it was a good idea to start watching The Studio before seeing A Minecraft Movie? The Apple TV+ series, which lampoons the current state of the IP-obsessed movie industry to hilariously cringey depths, opens with an episode about Seth Rogen’s pressured studio executive being saddled with developing a movie based on Kool-Aid, and from the brief glimpses we get of that (thankfully fictional) movie, it’s as soulless and corporate-driven a product as you can imagine.

Apple knew exactly what it was doing by dropping The Studio just before the release of A Minecraft Movie, which really is that Kool-Aid movie brought to fruition. Completely devoid of any charm, passion, heart or any type of emotional engagement (other than perhaps embarrassment for those involved), and pandering exclusively to long-time fans of the original video game franchise, this is one of the most cynical, ugly-looking and laziest examples of studio-backed IP cash-ins since The Emoji Movie. So much so, that I’m genuinely surprised it wasn’t actually developed within the world of The Studio.

The film, as directed (in the loosest of terms) by Jared Hess, begins with a blue-shirted man named Steve (Jack Black) explaining to the audience how he discovered a portal in the local mines to a vast CG-coated cubic land known as the Overworld, where anything can be constructed out of blocks. Years later, back in the real world, former gaming champion Garrett (Jason Momoa), newly bereaved siblings Natalie (Emma Myers) and Henry (Sebastian Hansen), and real-estate agent Dawn (Danielle Brooks) themselves discover the portal to the Overworld, where they find themselves trapped unless Steve can guide them through the vast land to acquire the pieces they need to go home. There’s also a whole thing with an evil pig witch named Malgosha (Rachel House) from another dimension wanting to take over the Overworld, as well as a strange romance between school principal Marlene (Jennifer Coolidge) and a non-verbal, Squidward-nosed “Villager” that wanders into the real world, but none of it is worth learning or caring about.

That’s because there is nothing in this script – credited to no less than FIVE writers – that warrants the most basic of interests. Of all the plots they could have gone with for a property that never really had a set story to begin with, they went for the most generic cookie-cutter premise that previously benefitted much better movies like Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and The Super Mario Bros Movie (both, coincidentally, also with Jack Black), only here there’s no sense of conflict or stakes, since the tasks set out for them are impossibly easy to complete, the villains are largely useless, and you don’t care at all about the heroes or what their own goals are. Nobody in this movie is developed further than their singular attributes, nor does anyone ever form a believable connection with one another, including the characters who are written to be siblings but almost never have a proper conversation with one another, leading one to question why some of them are even there at all since they serve little purpose in the actual story.

It’s written so badly that there are not one but multiple exposition dumps explaining the backstories of these characters throughout the first act, and at no point does it set up any meaningful arc that comes into play as the film goes along. Most of the actors aren’t even trying to expand upon their limited parts, leading to some awkward performances where they’re either underacting or overacting, or in the case of Danielle Brooks behaving as though her role was originally written for Kevin Hart. Only Jack Black appears to be having any fun, but that’s because he’s simply being himself rather than what’s written for him, and even then, it’s nothing we haven’t seen from the entertainer in other things. In truth, no actor can truly elevate some of the horrendous dialogue on display here, under direction that, in true Jared Hess fashion, is weird for the sake of being weird without any real sense of life or passion behind it, including the cinematography which, even in the Overworld, feels painfully bland and overly glossy.

Most crucially, there’s no life to this world we’re in for most of the film. On its own, the CGI looks pretty decent – to where one ponders why it wasn’t just simply a fully-animated film instead – but with the actors pasted on top of it, the fakeness of it all sticks out like a sore thumb, as it comes off as exactly what it is: an inexplicable green-screen hellscape that literally gives the actors nothing to work with. You never get a sense of awe and wonder to this place since it’s bogged down by Black’s expository dialogue describing everything we’re seeing, and while there are undoubtedly creatures and designs that Minecraft fans will recognise, they are just there to elicit applause from fans and nothing more. It really is just this generic CGI world that you’d see from a Robert Rodriguez film from the 2000s, only with a half-baked Happy Madison script driving it toward a disastrous final destination.

With no enjoyment to mine from it, nor any passion put into the craft of it all, A Minecraft Movie is exactly the kind of soulless, cynical product that The Studio was parodying with that fake Kool-Aid movie. Except, while that series (so far) generated real laughs and had actual passion for its subject matter, this is as lazy as it gets for studio filmmaking, with its reliance on the popularity of its IP and nothing else to make money instead of actual art feeling somewhat sinister in an industry that’s already on a knife’s edge. Audiences deserve better, whether they’re a Minecraft fan or a general viewer, because it serves them the kind of tasteless, unappealing slop that could only come from studio think-tanks so out-of-touch with artistic integrity that they simply stopped at “Minecraft but with Jack Black” when coming up with this idea. Which, funnily enough, sounds like an actual scene from The Studio.

SO, TO SUM UP…

A Minecraft Movie is an atrociously cynical and soulless movie that relies completely on the popularity of its IP to succeed while entirely neglecting the need to give any life to its story, its characters, or even the CG-coated world that looks painfully fake around them. It is studio filmmaking at its laziest, proving the makers of Apple TV+’s The Studio more right by the minute.