A Minecraft Movie review

If you ever find that you've fallen asleep in a big-shot Hollywood story meeting, and you need something to say that makes it look like you've actually been paying close attention, you could do worse than this. "Whose story is this again?" This question - who is the true focal point of the adventure being pitched? - seems both central to any film and also one of the easiest things to lose track of in the detailing.

And so. A Minecraft Movie. Whose story is this? Is it Jack Black's, the loveable loner who finds himself drawn inside the world of Minecraft and loves it and thrives in there but loses the doodad that allows him to travel back and forth between worlds, and ends up missing his pet wolf very badly? Is it Jason Momoa's, a kind of Billy Mitchell knock-off, a former pro-gamer whose business is failing and who finds himself on the cusp of having to admit that he's actually a loser? Is it the young family, Emma Myers and Sebastien Eugene Hansen, two siblings who are trying to start over in a new town after the death of their parents? Is it Danielle Brooks, a part-time estate agent and woman of many side-hustles who finds herself trying to help the siblings?

All of these people have one thing in common - they all get thrown into the world of Minecraft, where they must find the doodad they need to escape, fighting evil piglins, navigating the nether, learning to both mine and craft and work as a team. Whose story is it? It's hard to tell. This is a film in which there's simultaneously quite a lot going on and also not very much. It feels convoluted, but then you write it all down and it's very simple. We're stuck inside this place, let's try to get out again.

So how is it? A few genuinely lovely moments aside - one involving knives, one involving Jack Black in Diamond Armour - A Minecraft Movie is firmly stuck in the cinematic genre of "high spirits" - a genre defined by a lot of energy and good will but little in the way of genuine emotion. This is an interesting genre because, despite its innate likability, nobody actually chooses it at the start of a project. Rather, "high spirits" is where you end up when something isn't working properly. Hudson Hawk is "high spirits" all the way down. I would argue The Fifth Element is "high spirits" too. I like both these films a lot - possibly too much, even - but I'd struggle to argue that their creators truly wanted them to turn out as they did. Like second tier gangsters, "high spirits" films often have moxie, but not a lot else.

A Minecraft Movie, which has three names listed under "story by" and five names under "written by" seems to have at least realised that "high spirits" was where it was heading early on in proceedings. The fundamental problem - before we get to the really fundamental problem in a bit - is that it's a film about turning up in a magical world, but the real world, as the film depicts it, is so loosely defined and silly that the magical world doesn't feel like that much of a departure. What's Minecraft when the real world has high school students making functioning jet packs in art class and where Jennifer Coolidge is the school principal? What's Minecraft when Jason Momoa is already rattling around in a pink leather jacket and driving a T-bird and giving out garbled life advice, and where the local economy is based around a potato chip business with a ten-foot-tall potato mascot stuck to the outside of the factory?

The film's solution to this tonal problem is to rely on the classic three-act structure as a kind of strait-jacket to keep everything in place. A Minecraft Movie starts out by whizzing through an entire Minecraft Movie's worth of narrative in the first ten minutes as it tells the story of how Jack Black originally ended up in the overworld. Then we hit credits and a very traditional there-and-back-again story unfolds as a bunch of new weirdos are thrown into this world of blocks and talking pigs. This structure keeps the movie zipping along, but it also makes it alarmingly predictable. You probably don't go to A Minecraft Movie for narrative shocks and postmodern surprises, but this is a film whose narrative beats you can call out well in advance, with surprising granularity.

What's in the film's favour? Casting, for one thing. Jennifer Coolidge might be villainously under-used, but absolutely everyone on board is a pro at making things brisk and charming. I will watch Jack Black in anything, even if here he's basically relegated to being an endless tutorial. The younger actors are great, Danielle Brooks brings a sketched-in part to life, and Momoa? Jason Momoa is genuinely fantastic in this film. He gives a wonderfully soulful performance as a difficult but ultimately decent man-child, and if there's any real emotion in here it lies with him. I left the cinema slightly in love with him.

What else works? Well, there is a lot of Minecraft in this Minecraft movie, so much so that the audience I saw the film with would gasp and applaud when a familiar item appeared. Piglins! TNT! Enders! This is a Minecraft film that has a crafting table in it, that tells its audiences about recipes, and which has a joke about the swiftness of the game's day-night cycle. Sometimes its take on the game looks a bit odd, granted. The idea seems to be Minecraft shapes but with realistic textures slapped on top. Landscapes look fine with this approach, while gear looks weird and the villagers are genuine horrors. Their flesh, to steal a line from The Big Sleep's General Sternwood, is too much like the flesh of men. (He was talking about orchids because he was yet to see A Minecraft Movie.)

But here's the real problem. There's a lot of Minecraft iconography here, but aside from a bit of weak chatter about the nature of creativity, there isn't a lot of Minecraft's true spirit or ethos. People make stuff from Minecraft, mine blocks and fight zombies when night falls, but by sticking so closely to this kind of ultra-traditional three-act adventure film structure - the very thing that teams like Naughty Dog have made a business of translating into big-budget cinematic games - the film throws in with the kind of standard campaign narrative that Minecraft the actual game exists in contrast to. Minecraft is explorative, speculative, open-ended, something to get lost in and get surprised by. A Minecraft Movie has a climactic battle and a mid-credits scene. Strip away the Enders and the diamond armor and this story could just about fit with something like Uncharted.

I know - making a film that truly captures the spirit of Minecraft as it's actually played sounds incredibly difficult, and the solution that this movie lands on offers a lot of moments of recognition and some wonderful actors elevating the basic material. This is A Minecraft Movie, after all.

But I left feeling that The Minecraft Movie, something weirder and trickier and perhaps less formally careful, is out there somewhere, its bright potential untouched. Minecraft hardly needs a film in the first place - it's already a phenomenon, a Pandora's Box, an essential formative aspect of the childhoods of millions of people around the world. Even so, perhaps the film this game truly deserves is, like so much else in Minecraft, still waiting to be made.

A ticket for A Minecraft Movie was independently bought by the author.