A Minecraft Movie (2025) – Loading…

Released: 3rd April
Seen: 22nd June

Is there even any point to doing this? No, seriously, was there any point for any reviewer to even consider touching this movie? Sure, I’m reviewing it several months after it was a phenomenon, largely because there is no way in hell I was going to be in a cinema while a bunch of people went insane for a zombie jockey on a chicken, but even when it was just coming out, what was the point of reviewing it? A movie based on Minecraft is one of those things that’s almost certainly never going to be some kind of critical darling but no matter what it was going to make a shitload of money. Not only did it end up doing that (Currently it’s the highest grossing film of the goddamn year) but it ended up being responsible for the trashing of several cinemas when audiences forgot how to watch a damn movie and lost their minds during a scene where a zombie boy rides a chicken. A Minecraft Movie is review-proof, there is no point… except that I saw it and I just have to ask, am I old now? Am I too old for this? Have I aged out of stupid childish trash? No, it’s the children who are wrong.

A Minecraft Movie begins by showing us a young Steve, a boy who yearns for the mines from a very young age. However, due to child labour laws, he must wait until he has aged into the bankable actor Jack Black before he can go into the mines and do hard manual labour like he once yearned to do. It’s during that hard manual labour that he happens upon a magical trinket that opens a doorway into a magical world where everything is cube-shaped and you can build anything you ever wanted. He calls it the Overworld, despite knowing it’s literally a world underneath his own, but Steve is a stupid man. Anyway some bullshit happens and that magical trinket (It’s referred to as an orb, but it’s shaped like a cube because everything is) is sent back out into the real world where it ends up being found by notedly parentless brother and sister Henry (Sebastian Hansen) and Natalie (Emma Myers), eternal loser Garrett (Jason Momoa) and real estate agent/mobile Zoo owner Dawn (Danielle Brooks). This quartet will also find their way into this magical land and then be tasked with helping to save it from the evil pig witch Malgosha (Rachel House)… oh and there’s occasional cutaways to Jennifer Coolidge running over a Minecraft villager and trying to fuck him because sure, why not.

Look, no one thought that a movie based on Minecraft was going to have a great plot. The game is notable for its completely plotless gameplay, where you just get dropped into the middle of nowhere, make a house out of trees you punch and hope to not die during the night. The fact that they managed to find some kind of plot that worked at all is a minor miracle, though it is very funny that a film that keeps going on and on about the importance of creativity has the most stock standard “This weird world I just learned about is in danger and I, a human from planet earth, has to be the one to save it” plot that so many child-friendly fantasy films lean on. It’s incredibly stock standard in terms of plot structure, which would be fine if it then used the creative world of Minecraft to hang some particularly interesting things off of but it doesn’t.

That’s not to say it doesn’t try to have those good moments, it just does them kinda badly. For every decent joke about it being night every 20 minutes, we get something like the crafting table scene which is just kind of annoying (because they decided to give Momoa the ‘douche’ personality trait, a trait he’s almost too good at portraying because it gets annoying quickly). Any time they really have a chance to lean in and have fun with some of the eccentricities of Minecraft itself, it just feels off… possibly because transferring a game all about the creativity of the player into a movie where the viewer can’t do a damn thing means you lose some of the special magic. Hell, maybe that disconnect is why we had kids going insane in the cinemas, they had to do something creative and trash the cinema because Jack Black yelled “Chicken Jockey” is at least something!

It also doesn’t help that the characters are just not interesting. The two kids are you stock standard “Nerdy kid” and “Secret badass” characters that we know and tolerate and the three adults we spend the most time with… well, two of them feel like they got their personalities from a random generator and ran with it and the other is Jack Black doing the same Jack Black schtick that he’s been doing since Tenacious D played the best song in the world. Look, I enjoy Jack Black as much as the next person, and I have enjoyed his schtick for a long time myself, but he needs to stop. It’s the same joke he’s been doing for ages, and even in a movie where hammy over-acting would be welcome, he sticks out like a sore thumb. I swear he has it in his contract he has to sing for no damn reason and I’m sorry, Lava Chicken is just not a good song… come at me.

Honestly it feels like once A Minecraft Movie had the bare bones structure, they just piled on random crap and hoped it’d become meme worthy and for their sins, they got that. Every few minutes it feels like they threw random shit together and hoped it’d catch on, the Chicken Jockey is the perfect example of utter random bullshit that is just there hoping to catch on with the internet crowd and I guess they deserve points for playing the internet like a fiddle. Now, sometimes these moments are actually pretty funny, largely because this talented cast manages to make some of this insanity actually work pretty well, but so much of it feels like throwing everything together and hoping to get a laugh. It clearly worked for some people, it didn’t for me… I’m sorry, I just do not get what’s so funny about a small square zombie child riding a chicken. I’ve tried to understand but even my trash-loving brain can’t get behind that one.

A Minecraft Movie is the kind of film that has its audience in mind, it’s aimed at kids and it clearly got them in ways that I just will never understand. That’s great, kids deserve their own silly trash to enjoy and this is clearly doing its job. I wish it was a lot better, I wish the jokes were a little more well thought out and there was more originality to it but maybe it didn’t need it. It made a 90-minute story out of a game that has no story and while it might not be some great work of art, it’s clearly doing something right. This film is not for me, I would consider it to be kind of average if I was to be generous about it but the most harm it’s doing is making a mess in a few cinemas because a few idiots took it too far. Everyone deserves their trash, this is not my trash but if it’s yours then I’m glad you enjoy it… just please do not make me have to pretend that Lava Chicken is a good song, I have my limitations.