The 2013 CaptainSparklez music video "Fallen Kingdom" (a skewering of the Coldplay ditty "Viva la Vida") isn't just another instance of a parody song being superior to the original tune. It's also a solidly made short film set in Minecraft’s world. The Minecraft animation style and fixtures of its lore (namely those darn Creepers) are all there. However, back when it first dropped online, it entranced me even as a 16-year-old who'd never played Minecraft. Rather than reminding me of a game I liked, “Fallen Kingdom” was something exciting on its own merits. This blocky realm can house narratives that grip the imagination.
A Minecraft Movie does not reflect that potential. It’s just a very loud amalgamation of other kid’s movies. If you asked ChatGPT to churn out a copy of a 2000’s Shawn Levy movie, it might just produce the latest Jared Hess directorial effort.
A Minecraft Movie begins on a wrong note immediately evoking 2015’s PG-rated dud Tomorrowland. Like that Brad Bird directorial effort, A Minecraft Movie’s narrative structure introduces audiences to a magical world twice, including once in an opening scene before the protagonists even get there. Tomorrowland’s transgressions resurfacing in A Minecraft Movie means we don’t get to experience the wonder of discovery with the film’s lead characters.
That only amplifies the unengaging nature of Minecraft’s motley crew of heroes, which include American small-town residents like Billy Mitchell pastiche Garrett "The Garbage Man" Garrison (Jason Momoa), new kid in town Henry (Sebastian Hansen) and his sister-turned-surrogate-parent Natalie (Emma Myers), and real estate agent Dawn (Danielle Brooks). Garrison’s procuring of a magical cube leads to this quartet entering the Overworld. This magical realm isn’t just defined by everything being shaped out of cubes. It’s also a place where anything you can imagine, you can create.
This is a land where long-time human resident Steve (Jack Black) is happy as a clam. However, trouble is brewing thanks to evil pig sorceress Malgosha (Rachel House). She has plans to destroy this domain that Steve and the Overworld’s four newest visitors will have to stop. However, a race against time doesn’t mean there aren't multiple opportunities for the plot to pause so Jack Black can belt out “improvised” tunes about things like “lava chicken”. Black’s inspired Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle turn gave this gifted Bernie leading man a big screen renaissance. This actor’s always been talented, but his dedication to playing a teenage girl in Jungle really reinforced his chops in a major mainstream setting.
Tragically, Black’s Minecraft work doesn’t stretch him beyond his comfort zone. Hess and company are very comfortable just having him play a caricature himself. Gird yourself for Black’s Steve constantly pronouncing words like “treasure” weirdly or punctuating sentences with a guitar riff mime. What was fun and spontaneous in School of Rock feels coldly calculated here. Not only that, but some of his “wacky” antics go on interminably. Jack Black’s underwhelmingly familiar performance reflects A Minecraft Movie’s lazy reliance on the past.
Even the youngest kids will be shocked at this script (credited to Chris Bowman, Hubbel Palmer, Neil Widener, Gavin James, and Chris Galletta) trotting out very familiar sources of conflict like strained sibling dynamics or Garrison’s faux-machismo masking how he’s a failure. The LEGO Movie and especially Barbie wrung such powerful pathos out of movies that could've just been toy commercials. By contrast, A Minecraft Movie's stabs at human drama are just so surface-level and obligatory. Such ham-fisted attempts at "poignancy" had me even wondering why these writers even bothered to try in this department. Did youngsters really come to A Minecraft Movie to hear a college-aged woman say “I wish I could have been a kid longer” as she bemoans the responsibilities foisted upon her after her mother’s untimely death? Then again, similar questions abound regarding Minecraft's humorous material. Are outdated references to America’s Got Talent gags the TikTok crowd will go gaga for? Will the hottest gay panic jokes of 1995 similarly make this demographic lose their marbles like a Five Nights at Freddy's YouTuber cameo?
Perhaps hearing Po the Panda reference Ember Pearls or explaining Iron Golem’s will enthrall folks under 10. For the rest of us, A Minecraft Movie is just an excessively loud amalgamation of superior family-friendly fare. It’s also a total eyesore to look at despite a welcome emphasis on bright lighting. Translating the heavily pixelated Minecraft entities into deeply detailed CG organisms complete with realistic textures makes for tremendous nightmare fuel. These creatures needed to be 50% uglier to loop back around to being as adorable as Mickey 17’s Creepers or Return of the Jedi’s Ewoks. In their final forms, they look creepily trapped between realism and slavish devotion to their initial blocky incarnations. Even “cutesy” pandas and wolves just elicited a shrug from me, a person who thinks alligators are scaly babies.
The only ways A Minecraft Movie shines is indulging in full-borne silliness. A swine baddie named Chungus (yes, really) who talks like Andy Samberg impersonating Paul Rudd in Forgetting Sarah Marshall got some chuckles out of me. Meanwhile, any screentime spent with Jennifer Coolidge is a hoot. Her eventual subplot involving her literally running into a Minecraft Villager is gratingly superfluous, but at least her line deliveries elicit chuckles. Too much of Minecraft is going through the motions, rigidly replicating what other kids movies or blockbusters have done. The finale even kicks off with a light beam shooting up into the sky before CG characters fight in a dimly lit environment.
Chungus and Coolidge’s character, meanwhile, lean into Minecraft’s innate outlandishness by embracing silliness. These are the only elements that radiate specificity, along with the early Earthbound sequences harkening back to Hess’s 2000s indies (like Napoleon Dynamite and Gentleman Broncos) about eccentric people in flyover America. The rest of A Minecraft Movie is generic CG-heavy blockbuster material, but these opening scenes do seem like they could exist in the same universe as Don Verdean and “Vote for Pedro” shirts. There are even some tater tots while Dawn shows up with an alpaca evoking Tina the Llama. Otherwise, A Minecraft Movie is what you’d expect from a VFX-heavy comedy in 2025. Even composer Mark Mothersbaugh’s compositions alternate between aping Amblin movie music cues and Hans Zimmer scores.
It doesn’t help that A Minecraft Movie heavily leans on a miscast Jason Momoa for so much of its laughs and crowdpleaser moments. Desperately trying to muster up some himbo energy, Momoa’s Garrett "The Garbage Man" Garrison performance perfectly embodies the phrase “we have Patrick Warburton at home.” Momoa’s limited facial expressions and stilted line deliveries undercut potentially humorous moments like Garrison gnawing on super spicy chicken. This performance needed some Robin Williams, Rachel Sennott, or Eddie Murphy comedy chops. The affable Momoa just isn’t up to the task.
Momoa’s forgettable middling performance effectively distills how A Minecraft Movie’s a very standard run-of-the-mill kids' movie. Audiences have encountered its shortcomings like grating noisiness or creepy character designs in countless past features of this ilk like 2014’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or G-Force. "Evil doesn't die, it reinvents itself" as that one meme goes, and so A Minecraft Movie lifelessly rehashes the sins of its cursed forefathers. Save for a few absurdist comic touches (I chuckled at Malgosha being briefly flanked by two piggies holding thuribles), there’s little ingenuity in this family movie where everyone keeps espousing creativity’s virtues. Even the way Hess translates the act of creating Overworld blocks out of thin air into live-action isn’t very exciting or fun. Even if superior Criterion Collection-approved Minecraft media like “"Fallen Kingdom" or “Brown Bricks in Minecraft” didn’t exist, A Minecraft Movie would severely lack imagination. No amount of Jack Black scatting and going "oh yeah!" can erase that fact.