A Minecraft Movie is good enough — if you think that's all kids deserve

How does one review A Minecraft Movie? By saying that however stupid, kids will probably laugh when the cubist cow moonwalks? Or by reporting that someone's butt ends up being central to the plot not once, not twice, but three separate times?

Well, dear reader, take your pick. Because A Minecraft Movie is here: the Jack Black-led corporate indulgence that has been the subject of more internet confusion, derision and speculation than Kanye West's recent Ku Klux Klan interview.

But in Minecraft's case, the reason for early skepticism is perhaps most evident in the fact that the original has little plot to adapt. It was never designed to: the sandbox game released in 2011 as a creative engine, letting you "mine" block-shaped resources, to then "craft" block-shaped weapons, tools or scale models of the Taj Mahal.

Or — if you're a particularly uncreative older brother whose siblings demanded you visit their worlds — to spend hours manually filling giant holes up with TNT, exploding them, then filling the larger holes. And repeating.

Unfortunately, that habit puts me squarely in the villain column of this movie. As, in its climactic theme-stating moment, Black proclaims the moral: To some people, it's easier to destroy than to create. And Minecraft, he'll have you believe, is all about creating; this is a world designed for the maligned doodlers to finally find the acceptance that eludes them in the real world.

It's a weighty (and, potentially, incredibly lucrative) sales pitch, both for the movie and the game on which it's based. But while it does manage a certain level of fun, A Minecraft Movie — even grading on a kiddie grade-curve — is no classic. And at the same time, a clumsy attempt to have its cake and eat it too leads to a moral at complete cross-purposes with itself.

The one piece of lore that A Minecraft Movie does pick up on is its main character: Steve, the mute player avatar whose in-game attributes just about begin and end with his blue shirt. In A Minecraft Movie, that's considerably built out in what is maybe its worst quality: played here by a sometimes-singing Black, Steve gets what feels like a full 20-minute opening to simply report his now surprisingly convoluted backstory.

He explains that as a child, he, yes, "yearned for the mines" — a somewhat cringe-inducing reference to an aggressively millennial online joke, that speaks to how A Minecraft Movie seeks to spread via engineered virality.

He recites how he returned to the mines as an adult, indulging in an obsession given no explanation beyond being (arguably) funny, and plot-necessary.

He explains that while chipping away with his pickaxe, he found "this thingy" (a glowing "cube-shaped orb") and "this thingy" (a crystal receptacle for it) that, when combined, opened a portal to the world of Minecraft.

He describes the evil "Piglin" (just think pig) witch Malgosha's hatred of all things creative, and her plan to take over and destroy the Minecraft world using the cube. And (finally) he shows where he hid the cube to save, if only temporarily, his newfound square-shaped home.

In terms of introductory exposition, the breadth of info-dumping here verges on Up territory. Though where that Pixar classic jammed in a full heartbreaking short film into its opening, this sequence is more a ham-fisted way to set up the character and stakes without actually making them part of the story.

Which may not be entirely terrible. This isn't Citizen Kane after all, and as long as your five-year-old knows where they are and why, does it matter that they're basically just watching a dumber version of The Secret World of Og?

But as the designated caregiver, the adults in the room may feel a bit worse for the wear.

All that exposition is surprising, however, given it's for a character who will ultimately experience less development than any of his co-stars — including a squawking, nameless "villager," seemingly introduced solely to set up a joke involving Jennifer Coolidge and a Subaru Forester.

The real protagonists, a ragtag assortment of burn-outs dragged into Steve's world Jumanji-style, don't show up until later. There is the daydreaming tween Henry (Sebastian Eugene Hansen), his struggling sister and caregiver Natalie (Emma Myers), their side-hustling real estate agent-slash-mobile petting zoo aficionado Dawn (Danielle Brooks), and Jason Momoa's Garrett.

Garrett is the real engine of the plot. The ex pro-gamer-turned-bankrupt life coach is given the majority of the chuckle-worthy one-liners the movie has on offer, stretching the comedic muscles he showed off in Fast X. And as he comes to reluctantly and unwittingly care for and advise Henry, it positions the movie firmly in the canon of what I call "sad men stealing sad kids."

From Coco to Terminator 2, they read the same: a disaffected adult (usually man) is forced to care for a pint-sized, sad-eyed version of themselves. By movie's end, that adult fixes them both by destroying their old, selfish self — either literally, or metaphorically. No spoilers here.

Where that gets a little wonky, as it did with 2023's Barbie, is in a moral that seemingly wants to disprove itself.

To be clear, A Minecraft Movie and Barbie aren't even in the same toy box. But balancing a movie designed to further a brand with a story at least aiming for self-aware consumerist criticism is doomed to lead to mixed messaging.

While Barbie's corporate and beauty standard critiques may have been slightly undercut by its subsequent engagement and promotion of them, the intent of its moral at least survived. In A Minecraft Movie, we're never actually entirely sure whether the world is an idyllic bastion of creativity for misunderstood kids, or an avoidant fantasy they use to hide from reality.

Given an ending that completely undercuts repeated proclamations about how perfect the world of Minecraft is, it's clear some script advisers were worried parents may lean toward the latter. And so, after building up Minecraft as a champion of creativity in an otherwise hard, uncaring world, its characters basically do an about-face, yelling at you to touch grass.

Still, A Minecraft Movie is sort of entertaining — even if it's no Studio Ghibli. When it comes to a final judgment, I suppose it all depends on how good you expect a kids' movie in 2025 to be.