Stay informed with free updates
Simply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.
If you’re not familiar with the massively popular video game Minecraft, you may need to do some deep Wikiswotting to avoid A Minecraft Movie coming across as anything other than inscrutably hermetic. In this frenzied family adventure, Jack Black plays Steve, a master Minecrafter leading a group of newcomers through a magical world made entirely of cubes. Here they must battle rectilinear menaces including zombies, “creepers” and a porcine horde of evil “piglins”. The in-joke, apparently, is that Steve isn’t really a person as such, but the turquoise-shirted player character, or “skin”, that comes as standard with the game. But you knew that, right?
The Hollywood family entertainment industry still intermittently strains to squeeze narrative juice out of the more abstract phenomena of gaming and even phone culture (Pixels, The Emoji Movie), and the attempt continues to feel forced. What makes A Minecraft Movie differently odd is that it is directed (from the efforts of six writers, no less) by Jared Hess, whose 2004 comedy Napoleon Dynamite was a sweetly eccentric indie gem. Hess brings his distinctive goofiness to this film’s version of the real world: an Idaho town whose inhabitants include a failed gaming champion (Jason Momoa in a shocking-pink tasselled jacket); a shell-suited estate agent (Danielle Brooks) who keeps an alpaca in her car; and an enthusiastic but altogether squandered Jennifer Coolidge, as a school official who ends up romancing a flat-nosed, monobrowed Minecraft creature.
There’s some quirky visual invention here, but it soon devolves into a mess of explosions, pratfalls and creaky innuendo. As for Jack Black, who has already gone the mock-adventure route in his Jumanji outings, he is still relying on his patented “Whoah dude!” bluster but now, in his grey-bearded fifties, comes across very much like the Brian Blessed of the slacker generation.
★★☆☆☆
In cinemas from April 4
Read the full article here