Video game adaptations are generally quite hard to pull off and always have been. When making an adaptation about a game, it often reveals a lot of the trappings the stories of those games have narratively. In the rare case that the story is one of the drawing points to the game, even then a TV show would be preferable in order to fully flesh out the story because often, it is hard to cram a ten hour story into a two hour film. Now when a game has little to no story at all like Minecraft, where does that leave you when creating a film? Well A Minecraft Movie is the result of that and considering everything it has going against it, it some how still manages to not be entirely terrible. But it is still not good!

A Minecraft Movie focuses around Steve (Jack Black), a man from the real world who has been residing in the Overworld, a strange world where most things are cube shaped. He did not feel his creativity was respected in the real world so he stayed there instead after he found it. We also follow Henry (Sebastian Eugene Hughes) and Natalie (Emma Myers), siblings who have just moved to a new town for a fresh start. There they meet Garrett (Jason Momoa), a video game champion in the 80s still riding off his success in the present, who is now broke and being evicted from his store. These three, along with Dawn (Danielle Brooks) find themselves trapped in the Overworld after Henry messes with a glowing orb. They meet Steve there, who will help them escape and so the gang go on a magical quest in a strange new world.

Now if you happen to go into this film knowing nothing about Minecraft, this will all be absolute nonsense. But have no fear as Jack Black is here to explain every single detail about Minecraft to you. It is no exaggeration to say that in almost every scene, Jack Black gives some sort of exposition, sometimes multiple times a scene. You would be hard pressed finding any film with this much egregiously delivered exposition. Still, there is something about Jack Black explaining everything verbatim so enthusiastically that is charmingly hilarious. Director Jared Hess has worked with Black before on Nacho Libre so he clearly knows how to make him work. Even if his script is beyond stupidity, Jack Black is the heart of this film and even if it’s laughing at him, at least you are laughing. The other performances are not great but it is hard to blame them with this script. They simply cannot deliver this nonsense in a convincing way unlike Black. Momoa is fun enough too but that is the extent of it.

One surprising thing about this film is how good it looked, for the most part. The greenscreens for the live-action characters are not brilliant at points but that is the extent of the negatives. The CGI is generally really good and the art style it commits to for all the Overworld and the Nether looks great. There is a kind of slightly live-action cartoony art style going on and it would be really easy to make that look bad. It gets away with it though and establishing shots of the bright Overworld or the dimly lit Nether look fantastic. Even the various up close shots of Minecraft‘s many creatures are full of detail and the reimagining from their in-game counterparts are well done.

It would be so easy to sit and throw stones at the screenplay for the Minecraft Movie of all things because of course it is not going to be great. It does help that there are some genuinely really funny jokes, some obvious ones for the kids and some more subtle and crude ones for the adults. There is a small subplot about Jennifer Coolidge falling in love with a villager for goodness sake, it is not trying to be high art but it is trying to be entertaining. It would be very difficult to do the game any justice without having bad writing on the whole though because Minecraft and its world is without proper structure. The game is what you make it to be and this film is clearly done to please the kids that love it.

You have to know what you are getting into with this film and the crux of it is this. It is often condescending to just say a film is for kids but this is definitely one case where that statement is not far wrong. And it is not just kids, mind you, this is for anyone who has played the game and wants a nostalgia kick. While it does not make it the best film in the world, there will be people that love it because it so evidently shows passion for the thing they love. So on the whole, the film is not disastrously bad like many would expect. Parents may be at least entertained while being forced to take their child to the cinema to see it. And at the end of the day, if that child likes Minecraft, they will probably like this and sometimes that is all that matters..