A Minecraft Movie (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) becoming THE movie phenomenon of 2025 wasn’t on anyone’s bingo card, but maybe we should’ve smelled it coming. I mean, it’s based on the biggest-selling video game of all time, it boasts one of the most recognizable and successful family-movie stars in Jack Black (School of Rock, Jumanji, Kung Fu Panda, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, etc.) and its viral-meme marketing campaign was cooking (“I… AM STEVE”) months before the movie hit theaters. And boy, did it hit theaters: $910 million worldwide, and still counting, a megasmash for director Jared Hess, best known for another deeply kooky film, Napoleon Dynamite. You’re surely also aware that Minecraft became the most interactive moviegoing experience since The Room, with rowdy young audiences shouting memespeak at the screen, throwing props and generally losing their minds. And now viewers can be obnoxious and messy in their own homes with this thing.
The Gist: FIRST THINGS FIRST: I am as old as plate tectonics, so the sublime comedy of “chicken jockey” zooms over my head like a Tom Cruise Top Gun fighter jet, which is the kind of reference I can actually comprehend. And I kindly ask that you please don’t try to explain “chicken jockey” to me. I prefer to either apply my own interpretation to the text and context and subtext, or treat it like a David Lynch movie and just let it exist as its own weird inexplicable thing. Let it also be known that my offspring’s (now faded) obsession with the Minecraft game has forced some awareness upon me; I know it’s an open-ended experience where one’s character exists in a world where everything is visually rendered with large-pixel blocks, and the objective is to have fun building things, avoiding zombies, playing with friends online and, I think, occasionally partaking upon quests to find objects or encounter creatures. Its lack of a clear endpoint means you will never stop playing it, which is either ingenious or Satanically evil, or wherever the twain shall meet.
I will now explain how Jack Black fits into all this. He plays Steve, a former doorknob salesman who one day ventures into a mine and finds a “cube-shaped orb” (don’t ask, just laugh?) that zaps him to the Minecraft world, dubbed the Overworld, where he builds his own little happy place before he’s captured by some evil pig creatures called Piglins. He sends his wolf pet Dennis to the “real” world to keep the “cube-shaped orb” out of the bad guys’ hands – and then it eventually gets tossed into a storage unit and auctioned off to Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison (Jason Momoa), a faded 1980s relic in Vision Street Wear hightops who’s an amalgamation of Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler and controversial real-life Donkey Kong champ Billy Mitchell. Now, I know what you’re thinking: How in the living hell can one movie contain two of the current cinema’s most OTT alpha-nutjobs in Jack Black and Jason Momoa? One, very carefully, of course. And two, by making the movie around them even more garish, wacky and nonsensical, which is a big ask, but Hess is game for it.
Anyhow. While sad guy Garrett still tries to draft on his status as a former arcade-game champ and wonders if the “cube-shaped orb” can help him save his sinking vintage video game shop – DJ, please drop the needle on a circa-’89 Skid Row power ballad – we meet a pair of new arrivals to his hometown of Chuglass, Idaho, the potato chip capital of the world: Recent orphans Henry (Sebastian Hansen), a tweener, and his older sister Natalie (Emma Myers), who has a new gig managing social media at a potato chip factory, where, par for the course, she looks like she’s 12 and has to explain TikTok and shit to befuddled people decades older than her. The siblings are sort of friends with Dawn (Danielle Brooks), a real estate agent and traveling alpaca petting zoo owner, and, what with one thing and another, the three of them get entangled in the fringe of Garrett’s pink leather jacket – metaphorically speaking, anyway. The four of them soon find themselves zapped to and then stuck in the Overworld, where they meet and hang out with Steve and learn how to mine and how to craft. Of course, they need to figure out how to get home, but as the one guy who’s wise once said, if only it were so simple.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Well, Minecraft’s tater-tot jokes and pro-wrestling sequences appear to be among Hess’ career motifs – see Napoleon Dynamite and his previous collabo with Black, Nacho Libre. Speaking of, did I miss a Nacho Libre revival? Have movie-watchers discovered or rediscovered it on a streaming service and embraced it for its ludicrousness yet? Seems inevitable.
Performance Worth Watching: Playing a spacecase school vice principal, Jennifer Coolidge snatches the three or four scenes she finds herself in. And we’d expect nothing less.
Memorable Dialogue: Best line? Easy: when one of Henry’s dimbulbed quasi-bully schoolmates says, “My dad says math has been debunked.”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: And here one finds oneself contemplating two polar-opposite perspectives: On one end, A Minecraft Movie is shaping up to be a generational moment, with young people uniting in their gleeful exuberance for a piece of pop culture that’s creating indelible memories for them. On the other is the assertion that A Minecraft Movie is obnoxious gibberish that only rarely, and seemingly accidentally, makes a damn lick of sense. Is it OK if I wishy-wash between them for a couple of paragraphs, then quietly slide out the back door?
Try as I might, I cannot pretend to be an eight-year-old with a firm grip on this silliness – the shoes are too tight. Objectively speaking, I can see how The Youths would find delight in glugging gregariously from the dopamine that firehoses from the film’s heavily memed meta-moments, and seeing homo cartoonibilis oafs like Black and Momoa stumble, shout, karate-chop and sing their way through the Minecraft world. Part of the “joy” of IP-driven movies like this is simple recognition of something one saw, and maybe laughed at, in another context – an experience amplified when viewers are actually physically sharing the same space, hence the (please take the following phrase with a grain of salt) borderline-uncivilized behavior we saw in theaters. I get it. I’ve thrown spoons and footballs during The Room, and people from my parents’ generation wore wigs and lingerie to sing-along midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The experience transcends mere moviegoing.
But as an actual movie, A Minecraft Movie is kind of an abomination. Visually, it’s green-screened CG slop, and one can explain it away by saying it’s in the spirit of the video game’s retro-style look – while still recognizing that it’s hideously ugly. Some will defend its hodge-podged plot by asserting that the game is by its very nature and intent loosey-goosey, the user bringing their own level of focus to the gameplay – but I found it increasingly impossible to focus on any part of this movie. Black and Momoa clown and clown and clown while the other characters fight for air. Emotional engagement is laughed off here; that’s something for other movies to worry about.
The story eventually winnows down to quests to find thingies that’ll help the protagonists vworp through a portal back home, which is a depressingly conventional narrative route to take. And even then, the third act is a grab-bag of set pieces, a barrage of noise and violence that barely hangs together. I felt worn-out by the end. That’s a lie, actually – I felt worn out about halfway through. I admit to laughing out loud several times, at Coolidge’s loony line readings, and the moment when Black starts singing unprompted and Myers rolls her eyes and sighs like, oh god, not this again. Was I entertained? Not really. But I’m willing to accept that I don’t “get it” and never will. Knock yourselves out, kids.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Or don’t. Nothing matters!
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.