A Minecraft Movie (2025) is a blunt object used to beat you into submission. You might be walking into this video game film adaptation expecting to see the face of the devil presented in laser-projected IMAX. Moreover, you might even expect to see this year’s Madame Web — a cinematic disaster from which you can’t help but derive perverse enjoyment. A Minecraft Movie doesn’t allow for any of that, though. Instead, it dilutes its absurdity by painting the numbers so diligently that all fans of Mojang Studios‘ famous sandbox game will be able to muster is a mere scoff and shrug of the shoulders.
However, before the dull, green screen-cradled snoozefest begins, and after we get origin stories for Jack Black’s Steve and Jason Momoa’s Garett, A Minecraft Movie clicks into a gear reminiscent of director Jared Hess’ best work. Echoes of Napoleon Dynamite (2004) and even Nacho Libre (2006) are found in the opening act as one of our protagonists, Henry (Sebastian Hansen), moves to a new town and struggles to fit into the local high school. The film plays as a normal, funny high school comedy for about 10 minutes, doing just enough work to get the average punter onside before plunging you into the Minecraft overworld.
The absurdity of seeing zombies, creepers, an army of evil pigs, and the video game physics is worn off fascinatingly quickly as the slow, heavy gears of this plot begin to move. As soon as a glowing cube is introduced and the villain, Malgosha, voiced by Rachel House (Moana, Hunt for the Wilderpeople), begins to speak, the rest of A Minecraft Movie will flash before your eyes. The script, which has 6 credited screenwriters, goes from feeling like a quirky, coming-of-age comedy to a barrage of soulless adventure movies that kick off the third act with a big beam of light shooting into the sky — something this Minecraft film adaptation does not forget to check off the list.
There are a few things you need to make a family-friendly adventure movie work. They need to be genuine while getting the audience to invest in the tension and danger that each character is supposed to be feeling. However, A Minecraft Movie lacks tactility in its visuals, performances, and screenplay. None of those three components give you a reason to care, but it sure does try desperately to do so. After a certain point, your brain feels so numb that you’re just waiting for the movie to wrap up in your seat the way you would wait for code to compile.
Most desperate to please are the performances of Jason Momoa (Aquaman, Dune) and Jack Black (Kung Fu Panda, Jumanji), two of three actors who are given free reign to do whatever they want in this movie. Both of their respective schtick grows old very fast. Momoa plays this washed-up video game champion from the ’80s, named Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison, who is something of an audience surrogate for 40-year-old parents who stopped keeping track of video games after Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat came out. A Minecraft Movie wants you to think it has affection for video games, but oddly, it only shows love for games made before 1994 and Minecraft.
Jason Momoa’s slapstick and mouth-breathing comedy is just as boring as the rest of the film. Jack Black’s performance here is genuinely grating. From his “yup, that’s me” opening voice-over to his final moments on screen, it’s hard to pick out a line that isn’t him pointing to something and either explaining it or saying it in his signature silly voice. He sings, too, of course, in a moment met with audible groans in my theater. To put it simply, this could possibly be a career-worst for Black. Side characters like Natalie (Emma Myers) and Dawn (Danielle Brooks) have the movie scrambling to give them anything interesting to do as Black and Momoa chew up most of the scenery.
The third actor who is allowed to do their thing without restriction is Jennifer Coolidge (The White Lotus, Legally Blonde), who provides some signs of life in an otherwise inert film. She is a high school vice principal in the midst of a divorce who hits a villager with her car. As an apology, she takes him out to dinner, only to find real love for the first time in her life. This is the kind of genuinely hilarious absurdity this movie needed to maintain, at least to keep you engaged through the rest of the slop. Sadly, it’s instead cornered off, with Coolidge getting less than 10 minutes of screen time.
A Minecraft Movie is also plagued with unrelenting visual issues, many of which wouldn’t be so bad if the film didn’t call attention to them so often. When our ensemble steps foot into the overworld for the first time, the story begs you to feel a sense of wonder at the CGI landscape, which looks fine on its own. But when real photography is introduced alongside the CG Minecraft world, any sense of beauty is ripped away. The cinematography itself is flat and dull, where every character is lit from all angles in fear that something as real as a shadow might enter the frame.
This movie’s aesthetic is sickeningly artificial, like biting into a fake apple and realizing it tastes like plastic, or stepping on a non-crunchy leaf. The backgrounds are lush in theory, yet only add to the ephemeral nature of the film. Some things genuinely hurt to look at in A Minecraft Movie, too. The villagers have this sweaty, fleshy texture that, when mixed with their big heads and weird noses, just look unappealing. As we learned with Pokémon Detective Pikachu, realism isn’t always the best look for video game characters. There are also a series of flying scenes in the movie where the green screens are so obvious that it makes 2008’s Iron Man look like a miracle.
None of these issues are surprising. Hollywood has spent over a decade conditioning us to expect blockbusters to be riddled with bad CGI, dull stories, and uninspired performances as creativity and originality dwindle to the margins. Nobody expected creativity and originality to be present in A Minecraft Movie, and the film delivers on that promise with lazy pride. Somehow, the video game movie adaptation has reached a new modern low.
A Minecraft Movie hits theaters on April 4!
Release Date: April 4, 2025.
Directed by Jared Hess.
Screenplay by Chris Bowman, Hubbel Palmer, Neil Widener, Gavin James, & Chris Galletta.
Story by Allison Schroeder, Chris Bowmanm & Hubbel Palmer.
Based on Minecraft by Mojang Studios.
Produced by Mary Parent, Cale Boyter, Roy Lee, Jon Berg, Jason Momoa, Jill Messick, Torfi Frans Olafsson, & Vu Bui.
Main Cast: Jack Black, Jason Momoa, Emma Myers, Danielle Brooks, Sebastian Hansen, Jennifer Coolidge, Rachel House, Matt Berry, Kate McKinnon, & Jemaine Clement.
Cinematographer: Enrique Chediak.
Composer: Mark Mothersbaugh.
Production Companies: Warner Bros. Pictures, Legendary Pictures, Mojang Studios, Vertigo Entertainment, On the Roam, & Domain Entertainment.
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures.
Runtime: 100 minutes.
Rated PG.
