I am at the stage in my life where a film like Minecraft should come to me with a red warning sticker this is not for you.
My daughters are grown, I do not have grandchildren yet, and I am clearly not the target audience of this film.
But I take my work seriously and I have sworn that I will never condescend to films, even if they are computer adaptations of a game I have never played.
Besides, with all the eye rolls at the fact that a cinematic adaptation of Minecraft is the most cynical and predictable commercial act in the world at least until Fortnite The Movie arrives (and you know it will) I have learned that in Hollywood there are creative people even in the least personal projects.
Only in recent years I thought Sonic The Movie was really charming, The Super Mario Bros. movie was perfectly fine, and Dungeons & Dragons entertained me decently. So maybe Minecraft will also pleasantly surprise?
The director, as far as I know the only Mormon director in Hollywood, is a curious and idiosyncratic creator. Clearly, this is a commercial, entertaining, and not artistic venture, and aggressively childish, but maybe I will be pleasantly surprised?
In fact, what convinced me to watch it was the fact that in its trailer the marketing team inserted The Beatles’ song “Magical Mystery Tour.”
First of all, a huge amount of money just for the trailer. Impressive. Second, it was aimed exactly at me and my generation, a dog whistle that made my ears perk up children might get a video game adaptation, but their parents will get a psychedelic, trippy magical mystery tour?
About half an hour into the film, I was happy I came because it was charming (the use of “Just Can’t Get Enough” by Depeche Mode in the exposition scene touched my heart).
Six screenwriters are credited for the film, whose opening is identical to Super Mario Bros. and Jumanji, but which contains a large, almost puzzling, amount of silliness. Not sure if they wanted to entertain the audience, but it seemed the actors had fun on set.
Jason Momoa is almost unrecognizable as the champion of video game machines from 1989.
Momoa, a superhero in his other films, deliberately built a foolishly pathetic loser character, the gamer stuck inside a video game, and strangely the screenwriters do not use his gaming talent to get him out of trouble.
But the star of the film, and the sun around which the whole film revolves, is Jack Black.
For better or worse, this is his film, and he turns it into a perfect mess of operatic chaos.
It seems he wrote his own lines and convinced the production to let him also sing songs. Just as Adam Sandler colors every film with his unique palette, Jack Black and his exaggerated performance give the film a distinct tone, sometimes anarchic, sometimes unbearable.
The plot and there is none tells of five characters stuck in the Minecraft universe who must learn the rules of the game to survive and defeat an evil queen who wants to destroy it.
Occasionally, the teenagers in the theater around me cheered when one of the heroes mentioned a concept that was probably dear to them from the game itself, making it clear the film winks at the fans and demonstrates familiarity with its folklore.
For the rest of the audience, it is a kind of Alice in Wonderland version, a world that seems taken from dreams, entirely designed in cubes. Strangely, this is a film where the heroes are never in real danger, and when one character from the Minecraft universe invades our real world, nothing happens.
This is what happens when one script is written by six people one starts an idea, the other forgets it. And so, the film loses the creativity it had at the beginning and by the middle it comes to a standstill. Minecraft was cute as long as it was silly. It stopped being cute when it became idiotic.