A Minecraft Movie: videogame block-buster has moments of cross-generational joy

Jared Hess’s A Minecraft Movie is a big (and not just in budget), brash and brazen family film – so don’t by fooled by the apparent modesty of its title’s indefinite article. It is the middle word that does the heavy lifting in the first feature film to be based on Mojang Studios’ Minecraft, the best-selling video game of all time. This is an alluring intellectual property with a huge readymade audience – although no doubt its status as a sandbox game offering vast open worlds but no real plot explains in part this film’s decade-long development through multiple writers (more than the five credited here) and several mooted directors. That third word, ‘movie’, is the film’s somewhat self-conscious solution to the game’s lack of narrative. A Minecraft Movie uses not just the game’s mannered features, but the recognisable set-pieces of other films (Jason and the Argonauts (1963), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986), The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (2003)) as the building blocks for its own fantasy story.  

In an economic information-dumping prologue, Steve (Jack Black) narrates the story of how his childhood dream to explore an abandoned mine was thwarted by a literal old guard, but was revived when the adult Steve, now a drone in a dull office job, remembered what once excited him. So Steve goes into that mine, and then through a magical portal, finding himself in the spectacular CG Overworld where at last his boyish imagination has free rein. 

It is a clever cross-generational gambit, designed to lure in not just younger viewers, but also their parents, on a quest for lost dreams and open-minded creativity. Soon four other disappointed human ‘roundlings’ will be drawn into the world of Minecraft: young orphaned Henry (Sebastian Hansen) whose inventiveness is being cruelly stifled; his older sister Natalie (Emma Myers), prematurely forced into adulthood; Dawn (Danielle Brooks), having to juggle various side hustles to keep working with animals; and Garrett Garrison (Jason Momoa), a washed-out kidult still living as though it were his videogaming glory days in the late 1980s. 

As they try to prevent small-minded, greedy villain Malgosha (Rachel House) using a McGuffin-like ‘thingy’ to crush all artistry and imagination, their resistance unfolds fancifully in a real culture war. Along the way there is cubist eye candy and colourful adventure for children, some blue innuendo for adults, and Jack Black’s absurdist singing for everyone – and universal joy too in the reality-transcending romance between human Marlene (Jennifer Coolidge) and a Non-Player Character (eventually, hilariously voiced by Matt Berry). For better or worse, that indefinite article of the title implies other Minecraft movies to come.

► A Minecraft Movie is in UK cinemas from 4 April.