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The age of clunky, amped up, zoned out, overly literal movies adapted from video games lasted a long time from the very first one, Super Mario Bros., in 1993, stretching on through such duds as Mortal Kombat and BloodRayne and Max Payne and (sorry, fans) the Resident Evil series and the grandiose liquid sludge of Assassins Creed and, just last year, Borderlands. So in a way that era didnt end; the potential to turn a video game into a bad movie never goes away. Why would it? Video games are the anti-movies. They have characters and worlds and narratives and action and fantasy and spectacle, but theyre ultimately a post-psychological form for a post-psychological age. They lack the heartbeat that (good) movies have.Related StoriesOver the years, though, lessons have been learned. Overtly pandering strategies have been abandoned. Steven Spielbergs Ready Player One, while not based on a video game, had the visual wizardry to put you right in the gamers seat. And two years ago, offering a bookend to a form that had kicked off so wrongly, The Super Mario Bros. Movie was pure mutating eyeball-tickling fun a fantastic video-game movie that was also a nicely rounded kids fairy tale. It demonstrated that animation was probably always going to be the key to bringing video games to life onscreen. It hit the dazzle-and-emotion sweet spot. And it set the bar.Popular on VarietyA Minecraft Movie isnt nearly as good as The Super Mario Bros. Movie. Its not even as good as Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves which, given the latters 50-year-old pedigree, might be described as the analog version of a video-game movie. A Minecraft Movie is just a flaky, spirited, low-hijinks quest comedy that plops a crew of actors down into the Overworld, the epicenter of the Minecraft universe, where theyve arrived by coming through a portal that looks like its made of pulsating blue slime. Its very 1980s, that portal, and the whole movie has a retro cheeseball flavor, even though Minecraft wasnt created until 2011.At first, we register how hard the actors are working to make it all look like a breezy screw-loose adventure. Whatever your feelings about Jack Black (Im mostly a superfan), no one can ever say that he phones it in. Hes 55 now, with a gray-white beard as big and boisterous as the rest of him, and though he might strike you as a little long in the tooth to still be doing his happy dazed stoner line readings, he invests them with so much conviction in A Minecraft Movie, he simply will not deliver a line of dialogue straight that he spikes the film right along.He plays Steve, who always yearned to be a miner and wound up falling in love with the Overworld, a place where you can literally create anything that pops into your head, even though it will always come out as the cubic version of itself. The place is a surrealist Lord of the Rings alt-world paradise thats also as angular, in its billowy way, as the world of Lego, because its made of voxels, which is Minecrafts fancy word forblocks.In the Overworld, there are blockish snow-capped mountains, blockish bumblebees, blockish pink sheep, blockish shrubs and trees, blockish flowers, blockish ducks, a blockish wolf, blockish skeleton archer warriors, blockish baby Frankenstein zombies (a whole army of them), blockish buildings that look like gingerbread houses gone brutalist and, in the underworld known as the Nether, blockish pigs, who have blockish boar incisors and are done up in a way that suggests a Mad Max biker horde meets The Dark Crystal, all of them slaves to Malgosha (Rachel House), the evil British swine queen, who has kept Steve imprisoned in a dungeon.Minecraft, in real life, is whats known as a sandbox game. Like Roblox, it creates a place for the player to invent things as much as it offers a goal of victory. And so the challenge of making a movie out of Minecraft is: How do you create a story we have a stake in if the whole point of the world is simply to hang out in it?The producers of A Minecraft Movie attempted to resolve this dilemma by handing the assignment of directing the film to Jared Hess, who is still best known for Napoleon Dynamite (2004). He has had a few quirky indie follow-up films and has worked in television, but watching a self-consciously absurdist filmmaker like Hess take control of a blockbuster monster machine like Minecraft made me think, at moments, of Episode One of The Studio, in which the hip director Nicholas Stoller is recruited to somehow create a movie out of the Kool-Aid franchise. Watching A Minecraft Movie, were always aware that the story is something thats been grafted onto the world, and that we dont have much of a dramatic stake in it that its just the films way of cobbling together something that works. (Which, in its way, is very Minecraft.)Yet Hess brings something likable to A Minecraft Movie. Hes a genial camp satirist who knows how to invest not taking anything seriously with a flaked-out conviction. A Minecraft Movie never stops goofing on itself, and thats appealing.As a movie star, Jack Black had a hand in inventing this school of air-quote daffiness, but the surprise of A Minecraft Movie is how much Jason Momoa gets onto the self-skewering doofus-kitsch wavelength. He plays Garrett The Garbage Man Garrison, who was a video-game champion in 1989 and now runs a corner store called Game Over World (its stuffed with old video screens and vintage gamer knickknacks), which is teetering toward bankruptcy. Garrett is a relic, maybe a clich, but I was amazed at how much Momoa, in a pink fringed jacket and heavy-metal locks, sinks into Garretts blissed-out cluelessness, his bedazzled narcissism hanging by a thread of desperate cool. Garrett and Steve may be overly similar personality types, but thats what makes the movie click the way they mesh and fight like rival dude brothers.And the plot? Do I have to go there? Theres a glowing blue orb the Orb of Dominance. Which fits into a box, known as the Earth Crystal. Plopping one of these things into the other, in a kind of Avengers-on-happy-pills way, will allow the characters to defeat the pig demons, and also to return to Earth. They already have the Orb in their possession; they need to journey to the Woodland Mansion to retrieve the Crystal. There is, of course, a Crafting Table, in which objects, or metal pieces, are placed on it and you bonk them with a hammer, and voil! they turn, with medieval alchemy, into a brand new object, often a weapon. As fun as these scenes are, the film could have done more with the mutating magic of it all. Thats where you wish Jared Hess were less of a comedian and more of a technological showman.There are two teenagers on hand, Henry (Sebastian Hansen) and Natalie (Emma Myers), an orphaned brother and sister who, despite their prominence, dont have much heft as characters. And theres a fish-out-of-water subplot in which one of the Overworlds blockish pacifist vegetarian monks a silent dude with a monobrow winds up traveling through the portal, landing on earth, and going on a date with Vice Principal Marlene, played by Jennifer Coolidge with her over-the-top diva broadness. Some of this is amusing, but like the rest of A Minecraft Movie it never feels like it matters. Yet its no insult to say that, in this case, that may be more true than not to the spirit of a video game that turns life into a blockhead version of itself.
