The idea to drop Jennifer Coolidge into the middle of A Minecraft Movie is a decent joke. If nothing else, it forced the parent sat next to me to patiently explain to their child the concept of The White Lotus. In the film – a CGI-slathered children’s movie, adapted from the multibillion-dollar video game – Coolidge plays a high school principal who ends up on a date with one of the source video game’s “villagers”, flat-nosed NPCs who converse in bunged-up honks. She’s reliably hysterical in the role because she’s able to land a line like “we stuck it out for the dogs”, while talking about her divorce, with an air of total spontaneity.
There’s a whiff of desperation to it, sure, but it at least suggests – unlike the vast majority of brands-turned-into-movies – genuine intent, rather than mechanical obligation. In other words, she’s not Chris Pratt. And there are, in fact, early stretches of A Minecraft Movie that seem to justify the hiring of Jared Hess, director of the oddball comedy Napoleon Dynamite (2004) – a brief promise that this could be a similarly likeable tale about unlikeable dorks living aggressively as themselves.
Minecraft begins with Natalie (Wednesday’s Emma Myers) moving town to start a social media job at a potato chip factory, with brother Henry (Sebastian Hansen) in tow. There, she meets Dawn (Danielle Brooks), a realtor with a zoology side hustle (hence the alpaca poking its head out of her car window), and competitive arcade player Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison (Jason Momoa, who speaks mostly in grunts, but has a revelatory enthusiasm for physical buffoonery). But none of this really matters; the plot begins in earnest when they stumble through a magical portal into the Overworld, a garishly colourful universe where everything is made out of large, pixelated cubes.
All these people, with their quirks, could conceivably fit into Napoleon Dynamite’s world. Where they don’t fit is the game Minecraft, which is, as the film’s own script boasts, “the biggest sandbox in the world” – a toolkit in which players are free to build kingdoms piece by piece, fight monsters, or get really, really into collecting gemstones. Anything is possible in Minecraft, which is a sentence that really shouldn’t then be followed up with the words, “so we cast Jack Black”.
Black comes off the back of lacklustre video game adaptations The Super Mario Bros Movie and Borderlands to star as this lacklustre video game adaptation’s Steve – Minecraft’s default character, a collection of blocks in the shape of a person sent to explore a collection of blocks in the shape of a world. Only here, it’s just Black, in Steve’s trademark blue T-shirt, stood in front of a green screen and delivering lines in the desperate tenor of a clown at an underattended children’s birthday party.
As an adaptation, it’s flawed from the ground up: replacing Minecraft’s pixelated cast with flesh-and-blood actors is roughly as weird as shooting an entire LEGO film by asking real people to hold imaginary cups in their hands. The result is not the hoped-for creative reinvention à la Chris Miller and Phil Lord’s The Lego Movie, made back in the heady pre-Mario, pre-Garfield days when it still seemed like a stroke of genius to cast Chris Pratt in a children’s animation. Instead, we get a monotonous series of battles between human stars and unnervingly realistic CGI renderings of the game’s various creatures: “creepers”, zombies, “endermen”, “piglins”, etc etc. Supposedly, this was shot in New Zealand. You’d never be able to tell.
There’s a through line, buried in here somewhere, about how it’s harder to be creative, easier to destroy. Unfortunately, A Minecraft Movie proves its own point. Creativity took too much effort. Easier to destroy the spirit of the video game instead.
Dir: Jared Hess. Starring: Jason Momoa, Jack Black, Danielle Brooks, Emma Myers, Sebastian Hansen. Cert PG, 100 minutes
‘A Minecraft Movie’ is in cinemas from 4 April
