PREMISE
Four misfits are suddenly pulled through a mysterious portal into a bizarre, cubic wonderland that thrives on imagination. To return home, they’ll have to master this world while embarking on a quest with an unexpected, expert crafter.
THE GOOD STUFF
JASON MOMOA & JACK BLACK – It’s such a strength of the film to have two men leading it whose public personas are zany and comical bro kind of guys. This film plays into many of their strengths as comedic actors in all the ways you can imagine. At this point, Black does the same kind of thing in family films, and surprisingly, I don’t think it’s ever really been that much of a hindrance to any of the family films he’s been a part of. He’s a go-to guy because of how naturally zany he tends to be. Momoa clearly bases his character on the Macho Man Randy Savage in all of the possible good ways that one can do so.
These two understand that the cheese needs to be HEAVILY applied to a script like this, and they’re completely game for it. They’re not trying to use more depth or character development to what’s already assumed of their characters from their visual stylings.
THE UNIVERSE- There are a lot of respectable things going on when it comes to the visual aesthetic of this film. The screenshots of it look so bad. The poster looks so bad. But when you see it in motion, you can see the creativity behind it.
For those who don’t know, the Minecraft game has bad visual graphics, and the filmmakers know it. It’s almost unfair to say that the CGI looks bad. But if you have played the game, it’s respectable to see what they put on screen to represent the game’s world.
THE BAD STUFF
THE SCRIPT AND THE PERFORMANCES – I understand this is a family film. Yes, I know that in family films, dialogue is usually the last thing filmmakers focus on because the kids are already in the theater, and they do not care about such a thing, and that’s the main demographic. I also understand that cheesiness is the name of the game with everything that’s going on…
But man, even when it’s all supposed to be tongue in cheek, there’s a way of comedically delivering these lines (as Momoa and Black do), and there is a way to not do that (like everybody else in the movie does). There is an Oscar nominee in this film, believe it or not, and she can’t even make this dialogue work. If there is a movie that seems like artificial intelligence wrote the screenplay, it is this one. It’s beyond eye-rolling; it’s beyond cringe-worthy, and it’s beyond bad. And many of the performances seem as if they’re reading off cue cards.
THE UGLY STUFF
THE SUBPLOT- My goodness. There is an astronomically stupid subplot to this film involving the romantic endeavors of a character played by Jennifer Coolidge. It makes no sense why this exists in the movie, and Coolidge is doing a G-rated Stifler’s Mom kind of a character. It’s so bad, and it pops up often. Whenever you see Jennifer Coolidge on screen, make sure that those are your bathroom breaks. All of her scenes are painfully unfunny and run too long.
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I’m not that active of a video game player anymore. I still play here and there, and I have friends who really do play and will often inform me about the goings-on of the gaming world. I know of Minecraft, but I do not know about the culture surrounding it. That being said, it was quite a learning experience to see how many people in the sold-out screening I went to understood this world and loved it. This movie is for them.
This is not necessarily a movie that’s trying to explain the game. If you’re expecting it to, you’re going to be disappointed, and a lot of the jargon that they’re using (and the references to the game that made the converted individuals in the audience at my screening loudly applaud numerous times) will sound like algebra to your untrained ears. Â
A MINECRAFT MOVIE is in theaters now.
