Guess when you are “the best-selling video game of all time”, “with over 300 million copies sold” as per Wikipedia, you don’t have to stress more than calling yourself ‘A Minecraft Movie’.
Guess when you have signed Momoa and Black on, you may also think you don’t need to stress more than throwing them together. A Minecraft Movie does that, again and again – having the two actors with a fairly good comic presence go at each other head to head. It’s not funny, particularly when you can’t escape the quantities of unwashed hair on their heads.
Still, Momoa and Black, who hold little of themselves back in this video game enterprise, are the best part of A Minecraft Movie.
Strangely, for a gaming enterprise that prides itself on its emphasis on creativity – differentiating it from the others – the film hardly has any time for those aspects of Minecraft. Henry (Hansen) is the sort of child genius who can get there, under the guidance of Steve (Black), but there is no method to his madness in hurling blocks around to “create” things – nor is the film interested in showing you the method.
We have fights, flights, swines, wolves, orbs, crystals, red minerals, diamonds, castles, towers, lava-cooked chicken, good people, bad people, real world, Overworld, and lots and lots of screaming.
And then we have Jennifer Coolidge, doing her thing. As a waiter at a hotel asks her and her partner, “Are you finished?” She replies, “No, I think he is Swedish.”
It’s injury to insult.
A Minecraft Movie cast: Jason Momoa, Jack Black, Sebastian Hansen, Emma Myers, Danielle Brooks, Jennifer Coolidge
A Minecraft Movie director: Jared Hess
A Minecraft Movie rating: 1.5 stars
