Steve’s Lava Chicken.

How About Notflix has been on a good two month hiatus, and while I’d like to offer some grand explanation of where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing, the truth of the matter is that I just haven’t wanted to watch movies over the last couple of months. I’m pretty confident I’m not the only one for whom 2025 has been total ass shit, and the last couple of months between my personal life and now the summer weather has me wanting very little other than the sweet comfort of death.

So I watched Minecraft. The movie. A Minecraft Movie.

I’ve talked before about films that are not for critics, and A Minecraft Movie is one of those films. And no, despite what a mediocre content mill film director and his Facebook group of miserable aging Karens would have you believe, I’m not a film critic. I don’t consider myself a film critic nor do I claim to have great insight into film and how to make or criticize them. I just like watching movies and then writing about them on the internet as a blogger of over 20 years. Try not to let my little opinions inflame your crippling self-doubt, Brett.

A Minecraft Movie isn’t for film critics for the same reason the latest Digiorno pizza shouldn’t be reviewed by the kind of gal who rates Michelin star restaurants. Because critics ask questions like does this movie need to exist, what impact will it have on the medium, how does it stand as a piece of art, what are the underlying messages, and why is Coca Cola such a popular mixer with red wine in Spain. I added that last part myself. The A Minecraft Movie exists for two reasons; Minecraft is incredibly lucrative as an IP and because its primary audiences children and adult Minecraft fans will enjoy it. Thank you and good night.

So naturally A Minecraft Movie would have a 47% critic rating and an 85% audience score because film critics are joyless and the thought of going to see a movie just to have fun is like cock and ball torture without the cock and ball. And I will admit I had my reservations about A Minecraft Movie, and a lot of that comes down to the initial shock when we saw the film’s art style. It looks weird as hell. But admittedly it did grow on me.

Directed by Jared Hess, I’ll note right off the mark I am a fan of Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre. I haven’t seen Nacho Libre in at least 15 years but I routinely get the theme song stuck in my head and can’t see a bag of tortilla chips without saying “those are the lord’s chips.” The screenplay was written by committee and let’s be honest is probably the least relevant part of the film and definitely the least important to its success.

We all knew the moment they revealed A Minecraft Movie what the plot would be. You’ve got equal parts Jumanji and literally every coming of age film ever. The guy who gets trapped in the other world only to be rediscovered when the next generation stumbles on the portal, and the kid who is ostracized for being weird and creative who will ultimately use his creativity for good and become the coolest kid at the school. Also the teen prodigy who finds himself an aging loser of an adult who finds his own redemption. But also Jennifer Coolidge.

A Minecraft Movie stars…how do we order this? Jack Black plays Minecraft Steve, whose job it is to repeat Minecraft memes like “the kids yearn for the mines” and to be Jack Black in a movie and make all the exaggerated facial expressions and body movements that Jack Black makes. Steve discovers the Overworld via a portal in a mine and disappears only for his possessions to be sold at auction to Jason Mimosa who plays Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison, a Billy Mitchell parody who is a former game champion and current giant loser whose entire personality revolves around the gaming championship he won twenty years ago. Not that he thinks about it.

Sebastian Hansen plays Henry, your typical kid moving to a new town with his sister Natalie (Emma Myers) who had to grow up too fast to play a parental role after the death of their parents. Danielle Brooks is here as their real estate agent, and Jennifer Coolidge plays the school principal. How memetastic is this movie? There’s a character named General Chungus. Stephanie Sterling must be loving this.

A Minecraft Movie is a macguffin plot; Steve needs to stop the evil Malgosha (Rachel House) from finding and taking the Orb of Dominance and using it to take over the Minecraft Overworld with her army of piglins. Do you need to know anything about Minecraft to enjoy the movie? Not really. There’s a handful of mechanics from the game that roll over to the film, but are pretty basic and self-explanatory. I personally haven’t played Minecraft since the days when Notch was half-assedly updating it, so I honestly couldn’t tell you how much of the stuff in the movie is actually drawn from the game or just made up. I understood it just fine.

And don’t worry if you’re not familiar with the game, the characters will just exposit something while it happens. You don’t really need to know that a zombie baby riding a chicken is called a chicken jockey, but Jack Black will just shout “chicken jockey” to let you know anyway. Also you don’t need to know the game connection to know zombies are dangerous and the bad guys. Also it’s a pretty common trope and easily understandable that the bad guys who exist in the underworld are weak to light and sun and all that is good.

Jason Mimosa is hands down my favorite character in this movie. Everything about him builds on itself from his hair, his pink jacket and shirt, the way he carries himself, how he talks, and his lines. Just absolute perfection. Jack Black is of course very Jack Black being given musical numbers and I haven’t been listening to the Lava Chicken song for the last few months without seeing the movie, no siree. Jennifer Coolidge falls in love with a villager who is voiced by Matt Berry, and that’s a sentence I said. Also I love Danielle Brooks.

And I love Jennifer Coolidge. Check it out.

Rating: A-