Last week Pitchfork wrote a review of Benson Boone’s performance at Coachella where they questioned whether or not the entire medium of music was was worth it for something that bad. The same question can be directed at film for A Minecraft Movie.
A Minecraft Movie is a movie with an audience of nobody. Who wants to go to a movie about a video game of building whatever you want to watch Jack Black and Jason Momoa play washed up rejects participating in episodes of Garbage Wars and being 80s video game legends? The plot is paper thin, and if you want to watch a movie that spends the first ten minutes on Jack Black narrating the introduction to the world after selling out one of his oldest friends for claiming the assassin shouldn’t miss next time after trying to kill Donald Trump – a fascist war criminal – then that’s on you – it shouldn’t take ten minutes to set-up the plot to Minecraft, a movie built around entirely on memes (“Chicken Jockey” is causing havoc with how crowds react to it in cinemas in the States; prompting discussions around the death of cinema etiquette) and poorly aged jokes that didn’t feel funny ten years ago and certainly don’t feel funny now – and even using words like “unalive” ensure it’s dated on arrival.
The plot is a fairly threadbare one about two kids forcing to move on from their parents and being sucked into a world as part of an oldball team that includes Danielle Brooks’ estate agent Dawn and Momoa’s posing-to-be-cool but actually a loser Garrett. Emma Myers’ Natalie is trying to get Sebastian Eugene Hansen’s Henry to grow up and not be as creative as he should be to fit in with kids his own age, who are sabotaging his jet-packs that he tries to build at school. It’s a simple brother-sister bonding plot where the two estranged siblings have to learn to work together again but for some reason it needed five writers to tell so feels over-stuffed and generic in a way that just doesn’t feel fun for kids and adults – who goes to A Minecraft Movie to watch Jennifer Coolidge’s divorced vice principal Marlene try to date a villager who has moved into the real-world? Why is there a real-world at all?
The ultimate defence for A Minecraft Movie is that it’s a kids movie so it doesn’t need to be good – but counter-point, there are plenty of good kids movies out there. Look at everything Pixar has made. Look at How to Train Your Dragon. It’s also a musical for some reason because you don’t cast Jack Black without having him sing; and sing badly in a way that feels like the movie desperately wants him to be cool. It takes the premise of every single coming-of-age movie to ever arrive in Hollywood and robs the game of any of its identity.
The rag-tag group is separated and has the guys go on an adventure while the girls build houses and look after animals – the boys doing the fighting while the girls sit back and do nothing feels a little odd. It feels borrowed from the recent Jumanji movies and the plots of both will only ensure that we get more like this to come – the quirkiness of Jared Hess’s Napoleon Dynamite feels threadbare and painstaking here, even in a film that is just over a hundred minutes long somehow feels longer than all ten parts of Dekalog. It’s an IP cash-in without a heart or a soul; and it’s a movie that looks and feels like it’s been written by five people. Maybe somewhere out there one of them had a draft with any creative spark or any kind of humour that was actually funny – or a storyline that resonated with the kids of today’s terminally online culture – but none of that even showed in what shockingly – is not the worst film of the year; only by virtue of The Electric State being even worse.
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