Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. What am I doing here? A Minecraft movie immediately creates a sticky paradox for itself.
This video game adaptation wants to pay tribute to the openw world flexibility and creativity of Minecraft while staying well within the framework of the game itself. That means including all the expected blocky visual touchstones and an obligatory number of cutesy gamer in jokes. The surprise of the movie is how long it's able to delay the latter.
Long enough, it turns out, for Napoleon Dynamite director Jared Hes to get his foot in the door, expertly adapting his dead pan comic strip style to a children's fantasy. Don't worry, I'm going to cushion your ball with this water bucket. Release.
[Music] H's foray into big time franchise filmm reunites him with Jack Black, the star of his 2006 slapstick adventure Nacho Libre. No one can accuse Black of halfassing his way to a paycheck as Steve, a man who yearned for the minds as a child, and discovers a portal into the magical overworld as an adult. He throws off the shackles of workday existence with such relish that his torrent of movie opening narration feels enthusiastic rather than blandly explanatory.
The short of it, bad guy pigs covet the orb that Steve has discovered. So, he sends his faithful wolf dog, Dennis, to hide it in the real world. Got a boy.
H reaches back to Napoleon Dynamite's dry humor, throwback fashions, and setting in that real world. He pauses Steve's story to follow siblings Natalie and Henry as they relocate to a small town in Idaho. There, creative schoolage misfit Henry crosses paths with Garrett Garrison, a former gaming champion who now runs a retro pop culture junk store.
Natalie, meanwhile, meets Dawn, a friendly real estate agent who moonlights as a kind of mobile zookeeper. That thing doesn't understand a word you're saying. We're talking.
In a movie for grown-ups, this litany of quirk might seem a bit much. Natalie is a young woman of indeterminate age who gets a job running social media for a local potato chip factory. Henry tinkers with his design for a working jetpack.
For a kid picture, though, it's sweetly silly, even distinctive. The kitschy tater tots and alpaca's ambience is pure hess. Jason Mimoa, in particular, makes a surprisingly good fit for the filmmaker's sensibility, playing a less bullying version of the blustery Napoleon dynamite sensei Rex Quando.
In fact, the first 30 to 40 minutes of a Minecraft movie have enough big laughs that it's almost a disappointment when Henry, Garrett, Natalie, and Dawn get sucked into the overworld. In the overworld. Whoa.
Anything you can dream about, you can create. Eventually, they meet up with Steve, who provides some standard gameplay toutelage in advance of their quest. The quest itself is conceptually muddy.
It's confusingly presented as some combination of saving Steve's beloved Dennis, protecting the orb, and eventually bringing the four displaced travelers home. And based on the uninspired action sequences, Hess doesn't have many big budget fantasy epics in his future. But a Minecraft movie stays light on its feet nonetheless by continually pausing for slapstick silliness and cartoonish little sketches.
Teleport you to wherever you throw it. Yeah, right. And that was the only one I had.
No biggie. Eventually, the more antic takes over, and the various CG landscapes populated by blocky people and creatures start to feel repetitive. It's like a slightly more polished version of someone's playthrough video, only with a couple of big stars getting thrown around the screen.
What a Minecraft movie misses from Minecraft: The Game is its combination of minutia and vastness. As much as the movie advertises its subject's creative flexibility, it short changes any potential obsessiveness. Instead, it makes the overworld look a little more like something out of a Mario game.
The parallels to Jack Black's other big video game movie gig become especially clear when Steve riffs out a song or three. As with so many game-based movies, the mismatch between what each medium does best isn't really reconciled by a Minecraft movie. But turning the world's bestselling video game into Jared Hess's best feature in years is admittedly a pretty creative undertaking.
Chicken jockey. For a big studio adaptation of a massively popular video game, a Minecraft movie lets a surprising amount of its director's personality shine through. Napoleon Dynamite's Jared Hess manages to fit some laugh out loud silliness into his overworld saga, then surrenders to the obligations of CGdriven fantasy adventure.
Thematically, a Minecraft movie offers a pat world is what you make of it lesson, but Jack Black and Jason Mimoa in particular sell it with a lot of comic enthusiasm. Bye-bye. Those things work for me.
Absolutely. For more movie reviews, check out what we thought of Snow White and Captain America: Brave New World. And for everything else, stick with IGN.
Bioon Dios. It means goodbye, brother. No, it doesn't.
Don't look at her. It does.
