Played Out: A MINECRAFT MOVIE

I was in elementary school when Pokémon: The First Movie was released. It was greeted like Moses returning from the mountaintop on the playground. It was the must-see event of the fall if you were between the ages of 6 and 11. Here was the totemic video game craze of the age at long last on the big screen. That used to be an important sign that your corner of pop cultural awareness had gotten the upgrade in importance. Now it’s just another link in the chain. I remember being a little perplexed by the adults’ reaction to the movie. Why didn’t they agree we needed to be there opening night? And how could the critics syndicated in our local newspaper and on television review programs be so baffled by its premise? The children have to go out into the wilderness to collect the pocket monsters in little laser balls and then have the creatures fight each other to gain points toward evolving them into other iterations of those same critters. What’s not to get? Ah, but of course, I thought as a child then. Now I go into something like A Minecraft Movie and feel a million years old. I get why adults wouldn’t get Pokémon then, because seeing Minecraft threatens to turn me into a humorless scold.

I was a full adult when that video game first booted up and I’ve gained only a passing understanding of its mechanics and lore in the decade-plus since. I thought it was some building game where everything is out of blocks. I’ve been told it’s about creativity or something? Don’t you have to mine for materials and then craft them into buildings or stuff? And there are weird blocky creepers and villagers? Now here’s the movie. It’s a painfully formulaic green-screened fantasy picture with a motley crew of live-action misfits tumbling through a portal and forced to save the animated Minecraft world from an evil pig sorceress who is plotting to shoot a purple beam into the sky. Jack Black stars in a fit of wild-eyed derangement, accompanied by Jason Momoa in a bad Billy “King of Kong” Mitchell wig, Danielle Brooks in a track suit, and a couple kids. They proceed through ostensibly wacky comedy and action in sequences that are basically just levels and puzzles punctuated by exposition. It’s all brightly, flatly lit, totally phony as the characters pose and joke in groaning—or cringe as the kids might say—one-liners.

It’s directed by Jared Hess, he of Napoleon Dynamite, and the whole thing feels like that film’s flat affect, simple blocking, and boundless insincerity yanked into a dull copy of a video game fantasyland. Hess is also surely responsible for its most absurdist touches, like Jennifer Coolidge falling in love with an animated character in an uncomfortable, but brief, couple scenes. The resulting mix is hectic and vulgar and violent—dismembered cartoony zombies lit afire and portly pig henchmen skewered—in a way that’s just barely not PG-13. It oozes irony and innuendo. (A joke about “yearning” to work in “the mines” doesn’t go over as well this week, does it?) And it refuses to do anything seriously other than flatter fans who, in my screening, reacted in cheers to every reference to the games. It’s so empty and awkward and flat, coasting on combative tropes and empty peons to creativity. I felt ancient as I grew discomfited that so many children would be putting this annoyance in their minds.