Movie adaptations of video games are a stony road. For every commercial catastrophe such as Super Mario Bros there’s a box-office champion such as, well, The Super Mario Bros Movie. Other beloved intellectual properties, notably HBO’s The Last of Us and Netflix’s Arcane, have found more suitable accommodation on TV.
Minecraft was never going to inspire long-form storytelling. What began as a simple building game – it was created by Markus Persson in 2009 – has been in big-screen development at Warner Bros since 2014 (the year Microsoft snapped up the game for $2.5 billion).
The protracted pre-production period is understandable: Minecraft may be fun, but its resolutely pixelated Creepers and Redstone contraptions make Lego blocks look sleek and spherical.
Jared Hess, the film’s director, leans into the original aesthetic and free-form action. His chaotic, proudly silly family adventure features a characteristically exuberant Jack Black as Steve, the game’s default player avatar.
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For reasons that can only be described as a bunch of stuff, Steve is joined by the recently orphaned teens Henry (Sebastian Hansen) and Natalie (Emma Myers), a former video-arcade champion, the Garbage Man (Jason Mamoa), and an estate agent, Dawn (Danielle Brooks), in the Overworld, the game’s baseline cubic dimension.
Fans of Minecraft will recognise the onslaught of Zombies and Piglins that menace the gang as they journey through diverse biomes, a lava-fried chicken shack, and magical portals. Superfans, including the late YouTuber Technoblade, feature in cameos.
Mamoa and Black have a ball in silly costumes. They may well set a record for the number of times “bro” is used in the script. Jennifer Coolidge, playing a lovelorn teacher, purrs her way through a date with one of Minecraft’s hexahedron villagers.
The moon is square and the action is so daft that it makes the Sonic the Hedgehog sequence feel like the work of Ingmar Bergman. Fair enough.
In cinemas from Friday, April 4th
