A Minecraft Movie (2025) review

Dir. Jared Hess

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★★½

I was not very thrilled to see A Minecraft Movie, so much so that my manager friend at my local AMC noted my lack of enthusiasm. The biggest connection I have to Mojang Studios’ record-shattering video game is watching a close friend play it on his PC while we were in high school. I understood the appeal, but with so many movies, and so many reviews to write, I was busy erecting a creative empire of my own.

It didn’t take long for me to realize my pessimism was futile. My stone-face dissolved into a grin and a full-blown smile early into Jack Black’s opening monologue. I’ll be eating crow for months. A Minecraft Movie is a blockbusting blockbuster, and a great time at the movies.

Don’t take this novice’s word for it. My theater was lively and jovial, the giddiness rivaled only by that of my audience for Wicked: Part I in recent times. A group of what looked to be high school boys almost took up an entire row. They clapped and cheered about a dozen times. My girlfriend and I joined in applause on various occasions. The laughs were consistent. The vibes, as they say, were stellar. This is a film that will try its hardest to shatter your cynicism like a Minecraft block, and you’d be wise to let it, for the forces of Jack Black, Jason Momoa, and director Jared Hess are too strong to be ignored.

Rather than spend the entirety of this movie building up the origins of its main character, Jack Black’s Steve, the quintet of writers allow him to tell his story via zippy voiceover coupled with montage. It succeeds in setting up the film’s commendable pacing, but more on that later. Steve, now a middle-aged adult with a shaggy beard, tells us he was once a kid, who loved to explore. He still does, but his soul-crushing job as a doorknob salesman prevents a lot of the creative projects he’d rather be doing. That is, until Steve discovered a glowing blue cube, which transported him to a magical placed called the Overworld. It’s in this candy-colored, block-laden paradise where Steve can turn his imagination into reality, alongside his trusty wolf-dog Dennis. Overtime, however, he was sucked into the Netherworld, a cruel place ran by a deformed pig empress named Malgosha (Rachel House), who rules the land along with an army of blocky pig/hog cretins. He sends Dennis back to the Netherworld to hide the cube under his bed.

Still with me? The cube ends up a storage unit purchased by a man-child known as Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison (Momoa), a washed-up local celebrity struggling to run his video game store. Oh yeah, the film takes place in Idaho, designed with echoes of Edward Scissorhands. One day, a plucky teen named Henry (Sebastian Hansen) stops into his shop. He’s new to the area, his guardian his slightly older sister, Natalie (Emma Myers), after a death in the family. It’s Henry who puts the two pieces of the cube together and transports them to the Overworld, along with a local realtor/zookeeper named Dawn (Danielle Brooks). Once they meet Steve, they need to learn quickly how to build weaponry and structures in this world, not only to survive, but… you guessed it: defeat Malgosha.

The first thing you might notice is how well this cast meshes together. It goes beyond chemistry. The screenplay doesn’t force this oddball group of misfits to question each other. Sure, Steve and Garrett have a prickly chemistry throughout, but it’s more rooted in playful, one-upmanship between two dudes who recognize they aren’t getting any younger (nor cooler, for that matter). Even when the team splits up (Natalie and Dawn go one way, the three boys go another), they still feel connected. They are all creative personalities at different stages in their lives, and the Overworld is bound to bring out the best in them in due time.

But all of this is futile if the cast doesn’t sparkle. Jack Black is the best conduit into this strangely beautiful world that you can ask. Black is absolutely at home as Steve, a character loose enough that he can assign him his ribald personality. The role affords the veteran comic the ability to run around, be the center of battles and chases, scream, instruct, build up his cohorts, and of course, channel his Tenacious D-side in more than a few brief but memorable songs (including one about his own lava chicken recipe, which earned a riotous round of applause in my theaters).

Jason Momoa adopts an Uncle Rico-esque character-type of being a lovable loser. In his pink leather jacket, looking eerily similar to Dora the Explorer, Momoa successfully matches Black’s energy, albeit in a more gravelly, disenchanted way that manages to keep the camaraderie light on its feet. Danielle Brooks, who wowed in the musical adaptation of The Color Purple less than two years ago, feels a little underdeveloped, but she makes the most of the moments she’s afforded with her affable personality. Sebastian Hansen — whose Henry is aptly referred to as Frodo-like at one point in the film — and Emma Myers defy the usual tropes of faceless kids in blockbusters, and instead carve out charming personalities for themselves.

The whole tone and writing is sharp enough that Jennifer Coolidge’s ostensibly worthless subplot involving her relationship with an Overworld villager (they look like monk Squidwards) provides more laughs than many other failed franchise-starters do as a whole.

A Minecraft Movie really starts to make a lot of sense when you remember it was directed by Jared Hess. My misgivings for Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre aside, Hess, in simplest terms, has thrived because he doesn’t take himself too seriously. He incorporates little callbacks to his previous works here, such as Henry’s tater tot gun and a wrestling rink where Steve is going to need to show off a signature move to save the day. I think the Masterminds connection must be writer Hubbel Palmer.

There’s also the pacing. This is a film that finally bridges the gap between the old sensibilities of blockbusters and the rapid-fire, whizbang sensibilities of modern entertainment. Consider the climax of A Minecraft Movie, which involves the group gathering. Henry quickly sketches up ideas for weaponry to battle Malgosha. Steve, Dawn, and Natalie construct them before whacking them with a hammer. Boom, they exist. The next scene cuts to the battle and shows them being utilized. Do this a couple more times, and then the battle commences, and it adopts a similar brand of kinetic pacing. This is how it’s done. No downtime. No exhaustion from needless planning and arguing.

The VFX seemed to make many of us collectively bristle when the first trailer dropped. Seeing this quasi-8-bit world brought to life with CGI and human characters is initially jarring. It doesn’t take long for the film to merge the two successfully. Adapting sandbox video games is a perceived impossibility for good reason, but A Minecraft Movie was clearly written and animated by those who played the game long enough to fall in love with it. The boundless creativity in set-pieces, art design, battles, humor, and modes of transportation is on full display, with a spirit akin to Jumanji. It all coalesces into a film that, against all odds and preconceived notions, does indeed harbor something for everyone, especially now that Minecraft has existed for the better part of two generations.

Starring: Jack Black, Jason Momoa, Sebastian Hansen, Danielle Brooks, Emma Myers, Jennifer Coolidge, Jemaine Clement, and Kate McKinnon. Voiced by: Rachel House, Matt Berry, and Jared Hess. Directed by: Jared Hess.