A Minecraft Movie review – Jack Black and Jason Momoa star in seriously cobbled-together live-action spin-off
In the absence of a single fixed storyline the screenplay can follow, A Minecraft Movie has a cobbled-together feel, borrowing a device from Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle – and, in Jack Black, a star – and superimposing an all-purpose quest-for-an-artefact structure on to a colour-saturated backdrop of cube-shaped vegetation, pink sheep and lax building regulations.
Directed by Napoleon Dynamite film-maker Jared Hess (delivering a watered-down version of the nerdcore quirkiness of his Gentlemen Broncos-era work), the picture follows four misfits: orphaned siblings Henry (Sebastian Hansen) and his older sister, Natalie (Emma Myers); Dawn (Danielle Brooks), an estate agent with a mobile zoo; and debt-ridden Garrett (Jason Momoa), an arcade game champion whose glory days are long past. The four are sucked through a portal to the Overworld, where they meet Steve (Black) – in Minecraft, one of the main playable characters; in the film, a purveyor of exposition and overacting. The villain, a piglin called Malgosha who hates creativity and is obsessed with hoarding wealth, provides an inadvertently neat allegory for the studio bosses who greenlit this egregious IP cash-in.
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