Boxy! You’ll never see a world so boxy. Boxy houses, boxy roads, boxy trees, boxy animals, boxy humans. A Minecraft Movie introduces us to a fantasy land that is simultaneously stuck in the past and the future. I mean, sure that sheep is weird, pink, and boxy (as it might have looked in the two-bit universe where it was created initially), but look at how dope that cinematography is, huh? Have you ever seen a box horse look so good? Neigh.
Even as a minor, Steve (Jack Black) wanted to be a miner. I dunno; I guess there are those inspired by the first half of Temple of Doom. I’m a little surprised the credits didn’t read “Jack Black Lung,” knowwhatI’msayin’? As a kid, Steve is shut out of the mines, thankfully, but he never forgets his dream and given the opportunity to be a human canary as an adult, Steve leaps at the chance, and with a pick axe and a dream, he quickly finds the seventh Tesseract or whatever. This transports Steve to the Minecraft plane of existence, where everything is boxy, things can be made and built with pointing, the days are twenty minutes long, and the freaks come out at night. Yeah. The freaks come out at night.
One question remains: Is Thanos gonna come looking for that thing?
After Steve gets stuck in Minecraft world, we get the story of Garrett (Jason Momoa), a sad sack of a human being who owns a video game store going out of business. This seems the least of Steve’s problems as he’s got zero marketable skills and is stuck re-living glory days as a pixel hero. Momoa
is actually called upon to act, really act, in a few scenes here involving storage wars. This is the scariest part of the film.
Of course, we can all see that he and some kids and a parole officer or two will end up in Mineworld, so they can all look silly battling blocky pig things. Luckily, the stolen kids, Natalie and Henry (Emma Myers and Sebastian Hansen) are smarter than all the adults in the party. That’s a low bar, but hey, this is a kid’s film after all.
There’s a lot of silly in A Minecraft Movie. A lot a lot a lot of silly. It starts when you see blocky llamas and it never really ends. This is OK. Movies don’t have to make sense. And if they’re marketed for children to enjoy, maybe they shouldn’t. I certainly enjoyed the look of the picture even if I didn’t enjoy the picture itself. I saw this in a crowd of children. They didn’t laugh at the jokes or sight gags. BUT … they did applaud at the end of the film, which I didn’t think they would (especially had they not enjoyed it). Hence, I am forced to conclude that while this film was -for me- all over the map in terms of action and inconsistency and general “WTF?” it can and will be enjoyed by your children.
There was once a doorknob salesman named Steve
Who discovered power he couldn’t conceive
He was taken to a plane
That messed with his brain
But he could build things you wouldn’t believe
Rated PG, 101 Minutes
Director: Jared Hess
Writer: Chris Bowman, Hubbel Palmer, Neil Widener
Genre: Getting’ blocky with it
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Pre-pubescent boys
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: OMG, Jason Momoa is acting. Please, stop that.
