Review: 'A Minecraft Movie' builds on blocks of offbeat humor, and the hilarious bromantic pairing of Jack Black and Jason Momoa.
You can’t argue with someone to convince them something is funny — it’s either funny to you or it isn’t, and what you find funny isn’t what someone else will think is hilarious, and there’s no use applying reason or logic to make someone feel otherwise. Funny is very subjective.
That’s a lesson I learned in full more than 20 years ago, when director Jared Hess made “Napoleon Dynamite,” a movie that many (including me) think is gut-bustlingly funny and others think is just weird and off-putting. That same lesson comes roaring back into view with Hess’ new movie, his first big-budget special-effects film, “A Minecraft Movie.”
Yes, this is based on the mega-popular world-building video game franchise, where people use 8-bit and 16-bit bricks of various materials — dirt, wood, stone, what have you — and construct buildings, creatures and entire worlds. It’s a game where players can create anything they can imagine, which also means it’s a game that doesn’t have a story, because the game player is supposed to create that on their own.
Hess and the movie’s six credited writers — notably the team of Chris Bowman and Hubbel Palmer, friends of Hess from Brigham Young University — recognize the game’s story-free sandbox is a challenge. It’s also an opportunity, to pack as many cool things from the game as they can, and find a through line to connect them all that will please the game’s fans and newbies. It’s important that the total says “A Minecraft Movie,” not “The Minecraft Movie,” an acknowledgement that no one is presenting their interpretation of the game as the only one.
The movie’s prologue sets up the idea that there’s a portal between our world and the strange realm called the OverWorld, where the Minecraft universe exists. It’s a place where the animals and plants are all boxy, and even the full moon is a big square. It’s quickly explained that nightfall happens every 20 minutes — one of many gags that veteran players will laugh at with recognition. Our guide to this weird world is Steve, a man in his turquoise vest who learns to harness his imagination into building amazing things.
The fact that Steve is played by Jack Black is a first indication that none of what we see is meant to be taken too seriously – and that we’re in for a lot of fun.
We cut away from Steve for a bit to meet the movie’s other characters. There’s Natalie (Emma Myers), a young woman trying to take care of herself and her high-schooler brother, Henry (Sebastian Hansen), after the untimely death of their mother. The two are moving to a new town – Chuglass, Idaho, the potato chip capital of the world — where Natalie has just landed a job creating social media for the local potato processing plant.
Henry, a nerdy inventor with notebooks full of sketches of contraptions, finds his way to an old video game store. Its owner, Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison — played by Jason Momoa — is a former video game champion, but those glory days are long in the past. There’s a strong hint of Uncle Rico, Napoleon Dynamite’s stuck-in-nostalgia relative, in Garrett’s story, which propels Momoa’s rather fearless comic performance.
Henry finds two objects in Garrett’s store: A glowing blue orb (that’s actually a cube) and a crystal box into which the orb fits snugly. Henry discovers that when they’re put together, the portal to the OverWorld appears. So, of course, Henry, Natalie, Garrett and Dawn (Danielle Brooks) — the kids’ real estate agent and new friend — go through it and find a strange land.
They also find Steve, who explains to them the weird physics of this land — like how if you combine a chicken and hot lava, you get fire-roasted chicken. (There’s a great bit of animation, involving Minecraft pandas, which is both funny and a capsule explanation of how the OverWorld works.) Our team soon discovers that they can only get home if they recover the orb and the crystal, which means defeating an army of nasty porcine creatures called Piglins, led by their greedy queen, Malgosha (voiced by Rachel House).
And while this is “A Minecraft Movie,” which is packed to the gills with creative computer animation and effects from New Zealand’s Weta FX, it’s also fully and hilariously a Jared Hess movie. That means the humor is broad and silly, which feels perfectly in character with a world where blocks of rock and wood appear wherever someone points their finger. It’s also a movie where, like with “Napoleon Dynamite,” there’s an unusual amount of attention given to tater tots — which apparently are to Hess’ movies what bare feet are to Quentin Tarantino films.
Carrying the comedy load are Black — reuniting with Hess 19 years after their wrestling comedy “Nacho Libre” — and Momoa, who create a bromance of bravado as they take on the Piglin army. It’s hard to compete with those two, whose personalities are as comically oversized as their beards, but Myers makes a strong impression as the serious older sister. (Jennifer Coolidge, our patron saint of uncomfortable comedy, gets extended laughs as Henry’s principal, who has an encounter with an OverWorld villager.)
Like I said, you may not find Hess’ brand of off-the-wall humor to your liking, and for that you have my pity. If you think “Napoleon Dynamite” and “Nacho Libre” are funny, then “A Minecraft Movie” will provide you with plenty of laughs.
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‘A Minecraft Movie’
★★★1/2
Opens Friday, April 4, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for violence/action, language, suggestive/rude humor and some scary images. Running time: 101 minutes.