A Minecraft Movie Is as Bad as It Is Popular

Based on the best-selling video game of all time, A Minecraft Movie is officially a megahit. If this is Hollywood’s savior, we’re all doomed.

Still from A Minecraft Movie. (Warner Bros.)


It is with a sense of incredulity that I find myself writing a review of A Minecraft Movie, which is a huge blockbuster hit.

I saw it in a theater filled with rows of boys from preteen through late teens, all of whom applauded at the end. I didn’t applaud at the end, because the movie is terrible. Though unfortunately, it isn’t even bad enough to be interesting.

A Minecraft Movie is tired, perhaps because this overworked material has been in development in Hollywood since 2014, with innumerable writers and directors trying to make something movie-like out of it. It’s got crappy cut-rate CGI that looks like all the other crappy cut-rate CGI that’s been shoved in our faces for decades. There are a bunch of dull characters having dull adventures, and shit-tons of voice-over exposition that goes on so long that it becomes hallucinatory. You wonder if you’ve been sitting in the theater for hours listening to Jack Black explain about how he’s a goofball named Steve who wants to be a miner but no one in the oppressive small town of Chuglass, Idaho, will let him pursue his creative dream. (Who has a creative dream to be a miner?) But then he breaks into a mine and pickaxes out some damn thing that propels him into the fantastical Overworld where he can create anything he imagines as long as it’s cube-shaped and so on and so on, until the opening credits finally appear and you realize with a jolt of horror that the movie has only just begun.

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