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I don’t have a ton of memories of watching movies with my dad, but the ones that I do really stand out. The first was a Sunday morning when he let me bail on Sunday School so we could watch John Wayne in The Searchers. My dad’s not a huge film buff, but he is a big John Wayne fan. We didn’t go to church that day, but John Ford’s epic western was still a religious experience. Even if you don’t dig the Duke, check out this flick. It’s pretty major. 

My next movie-watching memory was from 1977 when he took me to see Star Wars when it first came out in the theater. ‘Nuff said. It blew my little-kid mind. Then there was the time my pop took me to see 2010 one night when he saw I was really maxing out on teen angst. That movie is just okay (Great effects; awesome cast, but Peter Hyams is no Stanley Kubrick), but I’ll always love it for the time I spent with my dad. He knew cinema would help. 

Pop quickly figured out that movies were my love language. I know he would have rather been at a ball game, but he was there sitting next to me watching aliens and spaceships. While we didn’t do it a lot, he did endure some pretty heinous flicks for me. Now as a grownup, and a dad myself, I look back and treasure those moments. Not so much for the movies, but for the day we spent together. 

Call it karma, but my kid doesn’t like movies. He’ll watch an occasional animated flick or a science documentary, but he’s not cinema obsessed like his old man. My son has very little patience for live action or what he used to call “movies with real humans.” He wraps his head around topics that most youth don’t (microbes, diseases, geopolitics) and Hollywood doesn’t make much that strikes his fancy. 

But he is into Minecraft. So here was my compromise the other weekend. If I wanted a moviegoing memory with my progeny, we were going to see Jack Black’s Minecraft movie. I would be supporting Hollywood’s latest attempt to suck cash from the masses with a blatant exploitation of a popular IP with a voraciously dedicated fanbase. 

That’s not usually a problem for me, but this time I’d be in a theater crammed full of popcorn munchers who had no clue that Han shot first. They only know Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man and not as the messed-up rich kid from Less than Zero. And most of them have to be in bed by 9 p.m. Yes, the median age here was about 10. 

I consoled myself with my desire for father-son bonding and a hunger for overpriced buttery popcorn. We went to A Minecraft Movie on a Saturday night. This was a major dad moment. I was sitting next to my kid and his two pals because no self-respecting teen is going to the movies alone with his dad (Ewww). I had no clue what this flick was about beyond being based on a popular video game. 

My kid obsessively played Minecraft for a while and still enjoys watching videos of other people playing it. I don’t know much about it except that it features a lot of blocky animation and there are pigs and zombies and some guy named Steve. Since MInecraft is like the most successful video game of all time, I guess a movie version was inevitable. 

From what I know, there’s not really a narrative to the game. Players just do stuff, so that left filmmakers with a pretty blank canvas. I didn’t have high hopes. My fellow moviegoers, however, were super psyched. Once the movie started, they howled joyously whenever a catchphrase was uttered. They screamed with delight when a popular scenario from the game was recreated onscreen. The audience transformed into a kid version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show minus all the toilet paper and crossdressing. 

The story here feels reminiscent of the Jumanji movies with folks getting trapped in a wild alternative dimension, but it’s visually creative and the whole film pulsates with Jack Black’s wacky energy. Black plays Steve, a guy who gets whisked through a portal into a world of blocky farm animals and nasty zombies. He makes friends with a wolf-dog thing and settles in. 

After building a nice life for himself in this off-kilter kingdom, Steve gets imprisoned by an evil pig queen from another realm. She wants to overtake the Minecraft world, enslave everyone, and abolish creativity. Steve helps his wolf-dog pal escape so he can summon people from our universe to save him and lead a revolution against the pig queen. 

Back in the real world, we meet Jason Momoa, playing a has-been videogame champ who owns a rundown arcade in Steve’s hometown. He gets mixed up with young Henry (Sebastian Eugene Hanson from Lisey’s Story, a Stephen King series on Apple TV) and his older sister, Natalie (Emma Myers who plays Enid on Tim Burton’s Wednesday Addams show). They ultimately end up in the Minecraft world as Steve’s inadvertent rescuers along with Dawn, the local realtor/amateur zookeeper (Danielle Parker from Peacemaker on Max). 

I know it doesn’t make much sense, but just go with it. Once in the Minecraft world, this motley crew connects with Steve and they embark on a quest to defeat the evil pig queen and save the universe. The pace here is brisk, which keeps things moving so you don’t ask a lot of questions. And you don’t want to ask a lot of questions. It’ll harsh your buzz. 

As much as I want to dismiss A Minecraft Movie as a crass money grab, it is actually a lot of fun. Most of this credit should go to the cast, especially Black and Momoa, who seem to be having a blast. Their enthusiasm is infectious and it will add to your enjoyment. I also give props to director Jared Hess, who made the cult classic Napoleon Dynamite and previously teamed with Black for that lark about loony luchadores, Nacho Libre. 

Hess injects just the right mix of weirdness and whimsy here, like choreographing an action sequence to “My Own Private Idaho” by the B-52s. There’s also Jennifer Coolidge in a romantic subplot with a denizen of the Minecraft world, voiced by the inimitable Matt Berry from What We Do in the Shadows. Why? Just cuz. Trust me, you’re not going to this movie for complex storytelling. I’m not sure how faithful this flick is to the source material, but does it matter? 

Jack Black and his friends have crafted an immensely entertaining movie. Somehow they make this Minecraft world feel organic and not just some green screen ghetto. The mix of live action and animation is cartoony without being obnoxious and totally works. My nerd spawn and his cronies loved this flick and I must confess, I enjoyed my time with them. See this one in the theater so you can embrace the whole movie-watching experience. There will be so much love radiating off the audience that it will be hard not to get caught up in it.

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