Metacritic reviews

A relatively accessible, often enjoyable adaptation of the best-selling video game of all time, its family-friendly good heart unencumbered by its overstuffed narrative.

Jared Hess, co-creator of Napoleon Dynamite and a string of other small oddball pictures, brings a fresh perspective to what could have been a lumbering IP-pallooza movie.

A video game movie that encourages creation instead of just uplifting capitalism? That’s a small victory in 2025.

The Jared Hess-directed action-adventure artfully straddles the line between delighting preteen gamers and keeping their parents awake.

For a big-studio adaptation of a massively popular video-game, A Minecraft Movie lets a surprising amount of its director’s personality shine through. Napoleon Dynamite’s Jared Hess manages to fit some laugh-out-loud silliness into his Overworld saga before surrendering to the obligations of CG-driven fantasy adventure. Thematically, A Minecraft Movie offers a pat world-is-what-you-make-it lesson, but Jack Black and Jason Momoa in particular sell it with a lot of comic enthusiasm.

Full-throttle star turns from Jack Black and Jennifer Coolidge raise laughs but don’t help the perfunctory plotting in this screen take on the game franchise.

Minecraft is a game for absolutely everyone, and the movie gestures at including the same audience, with a few clumsy attempts at meaningful character relationships and personal arcs. But those subtle elements are disconnected and often contradicted by later scenes.

It’s a real credit to Black’s irrepressibly unique comic energy that “A Minecraft Movie” never feels quite as hypocritical as it should.

Some of the best game movies have adventure, heart, humor & good characters. I wish I could say A Minecraft Movie had these things besides adventure.

What makes A Minecraft Movie so dispiriting is how it fails to spark the imagination, betraying a core tenet of the game on which it’s based.