Letterboxd: A Minecraft Movie, 2025 - ★½

I watched this with my 10-year old, and we had a great time, even though the movie was terrible. The theater was filled with kids calling out, "I know that!," when they recognized things from the game and teens gleefully calling out Jack Black's lines from the trailer in unison. Most of the fun and energy from the main storyline came from Jack Black hamming it up through a hollow script, and I have a feeling most if not all of his memorable lines were improvised. But the plot made no sense, either as a story in general or as a Minecraft story in particular. The tonal shifts were bizarre, with Jack Black's hand-wavy absurdist introduction to the world quickly giving way to a typical Hollywood "sad kids with a dead mom" storyline. The other main characters are two varieties of sad sack in a town of sad sacks, one given a backstory, and the other given a car full of animals to suggest one. The most well told story in the movie was about secondary characters who have almost nothing to do with the plot. Their story unfolds throughout, and ties together in a post credits scene that may be the highlight of the movie. I'd actually like to see a quirky comedy about everyone who wasn't in a lead role here, from the storage auctioneer to the art teacher. It's almost like A Minecraft Movie interrupted a sequel to Napoleon Dynamite. I'd watch it again, and I'd have fun with my kid again. Sometimes bad movies are fun in spite of themselves.