A Minecraft Movie

A Blocky, Soulless Cash Grab Fails to Build Anything Worthwhile

It seemed that the “video game” curse that had plagued movie adaptations was broken a few years ago with the halfway-decent Sonic the Hedgehog (2020), Uncharted (2022), and The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023). The latter grossed over $1 billion globally, prompting studios to throw everything at that trend. The latest to get the treatment is the pixel-block world-builder Minecraft.

A Minecraft Movie (2025) adapts the game that is akin to Lego, where, out of literal blocks, you can build whatever your imagination allows. In a small American town, a young boy, Henry (Sebastian Hansen), his guardian sister, Natalie (Emma Myers), a real estate agent (Danielle Brooks), and a down-on-his-luck arcade owner (Jason Momoa) are all sucked through a portal into the cubed land called the Overworld. There, they encounter another human who has been enthusiastically living and thriving in the game's limitless creativity for years: Steve (Jack Black). His knowledge of the Overworld and its rules will prove key to helping the others find their way back home.

A Minecraft Movie is directed by Jared Hess, who first burst onto the filmmaking scene with his endearing Napoleon Dynamite (2004) and Nacho Libre (2006). However, the American director has since fallen into the B-movie category over the past decade, with only a slight creative rebirth through the Oscar-nominated animated short Ninety-Five Senses (2022). With A Minecraft Movie, Hess takes on his largest budget yet, but it once again feels like a large blockbuster studio film made from the C-suite rather than the director’s chair.

Hess fails to infuse any sense of style or cohesion into the film, with the story instead following a pattern of cramming in as many references and inside jokes as possible rather than developing characters or using the Overworld’s creative possibilities for anything original. The result is a throwback to the head-scratching video game adaptations of a decade or more ago—ones that leave both fans and non-gamers disappointed alike.

A Minecraft Movie, like many executive-directed flicks, is overcrowded with a checklist of characters and concepts shoehorned in to meet an arbitrary, studio-tested formula. The cast could have easily been halved to allow characters room to form actual relationships. Multiple location changes and set pieces are rushed through in order to stay under the magical two-hour mark, making each dangerous situation feel forgettable and unexciting. Unnecessary side plots drag the story down, existing only to justify adding more star power to the marketing campaign (Jennifer Coolidge as the school principal is a glaring example of wasted talent).

Even in a more tightened and streamlined version, A Minecraft Movie doesn’t seem like it would have been able to salvage much. I’m not one to pile too much criticism on child actors, who already navigate a toxic industry, but Hansen is abandoned by Hess, delivering a flat and monotone performance. What should have been a classic young-boy lead feels cut from many sequences—sidelined in the background with minimal lines and screen time. Myers, as the older sister, is also seriously miscast. At 23, she has a very young-looking face, making her appear more like a high school freshman than a college grad. The film expects us to believe she is Henry’s legal guardian and working in marketing, yet she looks like a child. Normally, a film would address this with costume and makeup choices to age her up—perhaps giving her a more mature wardrobe and a hairstyle that doesn’t scream “middle school.” However, Myers is completely abandoned in this regard. The result is a leaderless vehicle, somewhat livened by the ever-electric Black and a manic Momoa. Both actors embrace the absurdity of the concept and wisely avoid taking their roles too seriously. This is especially helpful for Black, who is used solely as an exposition dump, explaining how the world works from start to finish.

With a $150 million budget, the animation and largely CGI world are appealingly rendered. The textures on the CGI characters are particularly impressive, with details like glistening sweat after battles adding a layer of realism. In that regard, the Overworld feels like a faithful and immersive rendition of the video game world, helping viewers believe the characters have truly stepped into this universe.

In the end, however, Hess is steamrolled, unable to inject any sense of creative tone or originality into the film. The result is a checklist-driven, factory-produced Minecraft adaptation—crowded, incoherent, and frustrating. Poor casting choices and wasted talent become the final nails in the coffin of this embarrassing attempt at a video game adaptation.

2.2/10