Review: A Minecraft Movie

In 2013, Red Letter Media’s Rich Evans coined the term “non-medy” to describe humor with a negative value of entertainment. Imagine a joke so utterly abysmal that it actually diminishes your ability to experience joy and laughter—your smile evaporating like spit on hot asphalt. “Cringe” is too an inadequate an adjective; non-medy is actively hostile to the viewer, causing physical harm and psychological distress.

Anyway, I caught a screening of A Minecraft Movie this weekend.

Okay, I don’t want to be excessively mean-spirited towards a product made specifically for TikTok-addicted children. After all, I didn’t exactly enter the theater in good faith; this was a purely educational venture—a misguided effort to discover what allegedly appeals to today’s youth (I watched Blumhouse’s resoundingly mediocre adaptation of Five Nights at Freddy’s for similar reasons). Such endeavors are, of course, inherently futile, and only reaffirm the tragic truth that I am now an out-of-touch old fart; if the late-night tween-to-teen crowd at the Kips Bay AMC was any indication, this film will enjoy a bright future as a kitschy call-and-response cult classic in the style of The Rocky Horror Picture Show—the target demographic loves the memes, much to my dismay (I have been thoroughly, permanently traumatized by the phrase “chicken jockey”).

Which isn’t to imply that the movie is totally irredeemable. The early scenes set in the “real world” are just quirky enough to be endearing, giving director Jared Hess ample opportunity to flex the creative muscles that made Napoleon Dynamite a sleeper hit. Despite being thinly sketched and underdeveloped, the characters are, in general, quite charming: Jason Mamoa is clearly having a blast playing the most flattering depiction of an ersatz Billy Mitchell I’ve ever encountered (obviously, the former Donkey Kong champ’s defamation lawsuits have achieved the desired results), and Jennifer Coolidge absolutely commits to her delightfully weird role.

Unfortunately, the script consistently squanders this meager potential. The tone swerves unpredictably between cloying sincerity and postmodern irreverence—to the detriment of both extremes. By volume, roughly ninety percent of Jack Black’s dialogue consists of verbally identifying whatever he happens to see, which I assume is intended to function as some clumsy approximation of a “running gag” (the remaining ten percent, for the record, is comparatively traditional expository narration). Scenes begin abruptly and meander aimlessly for a minute or two before petering out unceremoniously; the bare skeleton of a decent narrative (themes, conflicts, complications, et cetera) is vaguely discernible, but there’s little meat on the bones. Structurally speaking, it’s a mere shadow of hazily familiar storytelling conventions—more summary than substance, as though the initial plot outline was rushed into production before it could be expanded into a proper first draft.

There are five credited screenwriters, by the way.

I can’t think of a clever or insightful way to conclude this review—and honestly, why should I bother when A Minecraft Movie apparently doesn’t even consider itself worthy of a definite article? It certainly didn’t deserve the amount of time I spent typing the preceding paragraphs.