🧂 A Minecraft Movie (2025)

101 minutes about a video game that forgot to have a plot, saved almost entirely by a man in a headband screaming about a chicken.

Directed by Jared Hess. Distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures. 2025.

🧂 Salt: 7 / 10. A nine-figure budget spent recreating a sandbox game's aesthetic with almost nothing resembling a story holding the blocks together. and ⭐ Stars: 4 / 10. Jack Black is working overtime, the memes are real, and none of it adds up to a movie that earns its own existence.

Somewhere between the Nether portal and the gift shop, this stopped being a movie and became a theme park ride with a runtime.

In Chuglass, Idaho, teenage inventor Henry (Sebastian Hansen) gets bullied for his science-fair gadgets while his older sister Natalie (Emma Myers) tries to keep them afloat after a family move. They end up crammed into a car with Dawn (Danielle Brooks), a real-estate agent moonlighting as a mobile petting zoo operator, and Garrett "The Garbage Man" Garrison (Jason Momoa), a former 1989 Gamer of the Year coasting on faded glory and a failing arcade. Garrett's Orb of Dominance, a glowing cube he swears is just a novelty item, turns out to be a literal door into the Overworld, the cubic, crafting-obsessed dimension of the Minecraft games, where the four land face-first in a world of dirt blocks and bad CGI chickens. Waiting for them is Steve (Jack Black), the Overworld's original human squatter, who's been trapped there since he arrived and needs their help stopping the piglin queen Malgosha (voiced by Rachel House) from using the Orb to drain the realm of all its creativity.

Jack Black is doing the most committed, shameless, borderline heroic work of the entire film, and the movie knows it. Steve gets an original song and a performance built entirely on the premise that total, unembarrassed enthusiasm is funnier than any joke on the page. Black plays him like a man who genuinely believes punching a tree for wood is the most important work a person can do, and for roughly half the film, that commitment alone papers over a script with nothing else going on.

The "chicken jockey" beat is the one moment the film actually earns its own hype, and the rest of the movie never gets close to it again. A baby zombie riding a chicken drops into a fight scene, Steve screams the phrase like a battle cry, and the moment somehow became the one widely-reported reason anyone under eighteen wanted to see this movie twice. It's a good bit. It's also proof the film's biggest cultural win was a single four-second gag that theater audiences turned into a ritual, not anything the screenplay built on purpose.

Jason Momoa's Garrett is a bit that runs out of road about halfway through, not for lack of effort on Momoa's part. Garrett's whole identity, a washed-up gamer clinging to a 1989 trophy, is a decent hook for a man-child redemption arc, but the script never gives him anywhere to go beyond "learn to believe in yourself again," stated as generically as possible. Momoa clearly understands he's in a comedy and leans in hard; the film just never writes him a second idea.

Malgosha and the piglins are a villain problem the film never solves. A queen who wants to strip a world of its capacity to create anything new is a workable metaphor for a franchise built on exactly that capacity, but the film treats her as a generic obstacle for a third-act battle rather than a threat that means anything. By the time she's dispatched, she's existed mostly to give the CGI team something to animate.

The Overworld itself looks expensive and strangely uninviting, trading the game's charm for empty spectacle. The blocky aesthetic translated into live-action-adjacent CGI should have been the film's biggest asset, a genuinely weird visual swing few studios would greenlight, but too much of it reads as a theme-park backlot rather than a world worth spending time in. It's faithful to the source material in texture and hollow in almost everything else.

The verdict: a movie that found one good bit, hired exactly the right actor to sell it, and built ninety-five other minutes around the hope nobody would notice there wasn't a second one. Jack Black gives a performance several notches above the material; Momoa, Myers, Hansen, and Brooks do competent, good-natured work in service of a plot that exists purely to connect set pieces.

So why only seven shakers? Because a film with this kind of budget and built-in audience goodwill shouldn't need one viral chicken scream to do all the heavy lifting a screenplay was supposed to do, and leaning that hard on meme momentum instead of story is exactly the kind of lazy, cynical shortcut this column exists to call out.

So did a video game with no plot deserve a movie with barely more of one? Depressingly, yes, and the box office agrees with the house, not with us.

Pass the salt. 🧂