A Minecraft Movie is an adaptation of the beloved video game that released this weekend. the film stars Jason Momoa, Jack Black, Danielle Brooks, Emma Myers, and Sebastian Hansen. A mysterious portal pulls four misfits in the Overworld, a bizarre, cubic wonderland that thrives on imagination. To get back home, they’ll have to master the terrain while embarking on a magical quest with an unexpected crafter named Steve.

Video game adaptations have had a reputation of not being good due to various reasons – one of them being that they are not faithful to anything that came before. As of lately, bad video game adaptations have been forgiven as they add more references and that seems to be enough for fans. If they are happy and help support the box office, then who I am to judge? It feels like event movies have been the one to make money. Unfortunately, I had a feeling this was going to be bad with all the green screen scenes. As much as I want to be happy that a film is helping the industry, I can’t help but feel like this is sending the wrong message by telling studios that we will accept mediocrity over greatness.

To be quite honest, the first few minutes really fooled me. If you are familiar with director Jared Hess’ prior work, you’d know he’s a bit of goof ball between Napoleon Dynamite & Nacho Libre. They were getting the sarcastic humor right and with Jack Black here, it felt like they were getting something right. Maybe, the film wouldn’t be as bad as I thought it would be. Then, for the next 5 or so minutes, the film proceeds to skim through so much backstory to help get to the other human characters. Jack Black narrates the entire scene to help make sense of it, but I couldn’t help but feel like this would have been the right movie to help explore the origins of this world. Instead, it rushes to a plotline that may have been better suited for a sequel.

When the film cuts to the human characters back in the real world, it completely loses all its momentum. Since learned of this new world, I don’t care about the new one. We get the same Jason Momoa performance from Fast X where he’s just playing over the top and his character struggles financially. Danielle Brooks is a realtor with tons of other side hustles. Emma Myers & Sebastian Hansen play as siblings who move to a new town after their mom died. You’d think between these four, the film would find the opportunity to show how they lost their childhood, but the film barely captures that.

When it does cut back to the human world, it goes on for far too long at about 20 minutes. Jennifer Coolidge is introduced as a school principle who ends up having a fling with a Minecraft character who accidentally travels over to the real world. This plotline in particular could have been completely cut. The plotline involving the siblings makes zero sense. The boy who looks like he’s in middle school is really in high school while the girl who looks like she’s in high school is apparently a full fledged adult with a supervisor job. It makes zero sense. What makes even more zero sense is the fact that when these character travel to this new world, their stupidity makes them think they can’t get back home when the teleportation device was still open. You can’t make this stuff up.

What you also can’t make up is how much they get away with the writing. Between 5 accredited writers on the script and 3 writers on the story, there was a total of 8 people who worked on this story. That’s insane. It’s clear when there are themes of not growing up too quick available, but they are never fully fleshed out, because the film is also trying to make sense of this new world through heavy amounts of exposition. What’s even worse is how much the film tries to get away with its sexual innuendoes that weren’t funny.

One concern I had with the film as mentioned before is how the talent looked in front of the green screen. It is bad, but the animation is actually not that bad. I thoroughly enjoyed the animation on its own, and it made me question why this wasn’t just an animation movie. The video game is meant to be animated. We saw this done two years ago with The Super Mario Bros. Movie. I think if the film dived deeper in just being animated, it could get over the hurtles of having to add human characters that fail to connect.

It’s clear this film is going to do numbers, and don’t be surprised when this gets a sequel. Much like Momoa said, this is the film the world is probably going to need to escape realism. I’d argue One of Them Days captures the right tone to help you escape realism better, but that’s just me. As I walked out, I overheard a kid saying he can’t wait for a sequel. It sucks that a film has to be built just to keep pumping out more movies rather that just creating something good. If and when a sequel does get made, I hope they learn from the mistakes here to create something better. Otherwise, I am not going to be any rush to see the sequel. I mean, I wasn’t in a rush to begin with.

Overall, A Minecraft Movie may offer viewers and fans something to escape from, but it completely misses the boat by creating something new and thematically meaningful. The film could have been better suited as an animated movie or even just a movie that followed Jack Black’s character as Steve. There was huge amounts of potential there. Instead, it feels like this one overthought the assignment much like other video game adaptations have before.

VERDICT: 1.5/5 (Really Bad)