“A Minecraft Movie” is a perfectly calibrated light entertainment. At certain points, it reminded me of that mid’-80s run of summer blockbusters that included the original “Back to the Future,” “Gremlins” and “Ghostbusters,” not because it has anything in common with them in terms of subject matter or theme, but because it’s a top-of-the-line Hollywood franchise-starter that expresses the sensibility of its director as strongly as the director’s previous, smaller films do.
The director here is Jared Hess, half of the married writer-director team of Jared and Jerusha Hess, who made “Napoleon Dynamite,” “Nacho Libre” and “Gentleman Broncos.” Accordingly, the adaptation is set partly in Chuglass, Idaho, the state that the Hesses hail from. The first third of the movie feels very much like a modestly budgeted Hess production, about a band of eccentric goofball outcast strangers coming together to form a makeshift family or mini-community while hunting for The Orb of Dominance (actually a cube), and growing closer until, at the end, you feel as if they sincerely do love each other.
There’s an older teenage girl, Natalie (Emma Meyers) and her younger teenage brother, Henry (Sebastian Hansen); a washed-up former video game champion termed video game store owner named Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison (Jason Momoa), who’s stuck in the ’80s in just about every way; and Dawn (Rachel Brooks), a real estate agent who owns a mobile petting zoo (which gives her an advantage dealing with the various blocky critters the gang encounters in the other realm). Momoa, who’s been leaning into his comedy chops recently, is a treat here. The character is exuberant, self-regarding, selfish but capable of change, and a total doofus who’s constantly falling down and running into things and insisting he speaks Spanish when he really, really doesn’t. Momoa plays him as a clown who thinks he’s an avatar of manhood. His little-kid shriek is never not funny.
And of course there’s Steve (Jack Black), protagonist of the game, who as a child fantasized about being a miner, finally gained access to a mine that he was forbidden to enter as a child, and….well, I guess you could say it’s sort of a Jumanji situation (Black costarred in the recent “Jumanji” movies, too), with Steve having been trapped there after sending his adorable dog Dennis (made out of blocks, like most everything else in that world) to hide the Orb of Dominance and its container The Earth Crystal (the dog hides it under Steve’s bed, one of many wonderful anti-climactic sight gags).
I wouldn’t have minded if the whole film had been about these characters going about their business in Chuglass, Idaho. The movie loses a wee bit of specialness once everybody comes together in the other realms and the quest phase of the story gets into gear. The scope of the production makes the Hess brand of obsessive deadpan slapstick harder to pull off. But the filmmakers do pull it off, partly by making a heavily digital production feel as analog as possible, from the backgrounds that look like forced-perspective paintings in a theater to the charming props and sets that are all bespoke (most of them appear to have been built in a wood shop) to the blockheaded zombies who come shambling after the heroes and are pretty clearly performers in suits with huge latex heads with digital faces superimposed.
The result is about as peculiar as a film like this can be, which is the main reason it made me think of some of those classic ’80s movies (or at least the ones that were pretty good but had memorable characters and other qualities that made them re-watchable—like “The Goonies” or “Mrs. Doubtfire”). A few sequences attain peak goofiness, such as an aerial chase involving gas-powered squid balloons through a winding canyon scored to the B-52s “Private Idaho” with Momoa and Black intertwined in such suggestive configurations that it turns into a coded, airborne consummation. (“Private Idaho” is a shout-out to the director’s home state that’s also a sideways invocation of “My Own Private Idaho,” Gus van Sant’s 1991 same-sex love story. This movie has a lot of silly jokes like this, that work on more than one level.)
As the movie takes care of the brand management, nostalgia pandering, and merch-selling parts of the assignment—albeit with more inventiveness and heart than you might’ve expected—Jennifer Coolidge’s typically batty performance as Marlene, the vice principal of Henry’s school, makes sure that “A Minecraft Movie” stays tethered to Hessian comic energy. Everyone is operating on the same wavelength. Their teamwork is marvelous. I grin every time I think of the scene where a horny Marlene gives Garrett more information about her marriage than anyone could want, and he takes a beat and then says, with aching sincerity, “The man who divorced you is a complete idiot.” Hess also gives himself a vocal cameo as General Chungus, the chief henchman of Malgosah (Rachel House), the Piglin Ruler of the Nether, an agent of chaos who has the upbeat whiny voice of a summer camp counselor who looks for any excuse to take out an acoustic guitar and lead a singalong.
I’ve seen it twice now and might go back again, if I want to kill a couple of hours on a weekend afternoon. And I have never played Minecraft. Yes, it’s true. Please put the basket of rotten produce away. I am a decent man who has redeeming qualities. When Minecraft was released in 2009, I was a single parent of two young kids holding multiple jobs, so I didn’t have much leisure time. We had a Wii, but they played Minecraft at other kids’ houses.
That my lack of Minecraft experience did not impede my enjoyment is another endorsement of this movie. Aside from the occasional moments when a character or situation from the game appears onscreen and a smattering of viewers applaud in grateful recognition, you can have fun with whatever sensibility you bring into the theater. I think I understood the rules of Minecraft as they were laid out by the characters, but I also think it didn’t matter as much as the relationships and the comedy, which is how it ought to be regardless.
There’s a message of sorts, conveyed in a roundabout way but with enthusiasm: creativity for its own sake is to be encouraged and should be individual and personal, and forces like the bad guys in this movie who try to denigrate it in favor of work and money are villains who want to squeeze all the pleasure from life and make everything about money. Yes, this is another studio movie that uses very valuable corporate intellectual property to criticize certain capitalist tendencies; but there are many films that do that, and do it well, and this is another.
One of Steve’s lines also resonates with what’s happening in the news at this moment, though it’s got to be a coincidence considering how long it takes to make a movie like this: “It’s harder to create than to destroy.”
