A MINECRAFT MOVIE

Directing: B
Acting: B-
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B
Special Effects: B+

I could have had a field day ripping A Minecraft Movie apart—if it weren’t funny. But, the thing is, I laughed a lot. And maybe you won’t. Maybe you will. This movie has a pretty specific and peculiar sensibility, which gets very goofy and dumb, for no other reason that its self-reward. It spoke to me. And I don’t even have the slightest bit of knowledge or familiarity with the 2011 video game on which it’s based, although plenty of the action feels like a video game. Or what I imagine a video game to be like, anyway. What do I know? I played a few video games at a friend’s house in the summer of 1989, decided fairly quickly that it wasn’t for me, and haven’t bothered with it since. Most of this movie’s audience will have been born after that.

How easily I settled into A Minecraft Movie’s delightfully absurdist humor only better serves to recommend it. Anyone open to its brand of humor can enjoy this movie, whether they’re familiar with the video game or not. Granted, the setup a paper thin and utterly stupid, introducing us to Jack Black’s Steve, a doorknob salesman with a lifelong dream of being a miner. He follows his dream, goes down into a mine, and within minutes uncovers an “orb” (it’s actually a cube) that opens a portal into “the Overworld,” a place where creativity knows no bounds—well, except for the unstated fact that apparently everything has to be designed in cubed shapes.

Anyway, everything that so quickly gets Steve to the Overworked is ridiculously convenient and untied to any backstory to give Steve any character dimension whatsoever. I don’t seriously think this is the case, but I suppose you could argue that this setup is itself a meta commentary on the thinly contrived characters in any typical movie of this ilk. There are no intellectual pursuits here—getting right to the delightful absurdities is very much the point.

I could have lived without the way Jack Black’s delivery is far more over the top than it needs to be, every single line he delivers. He’s overly excited about everything he sees onscreen, or even any particular thought he has. It’s on-brand for Jack Black, I guess, and makes him fit better in the Overworld than he does in the real world. The others that find themselves sucked into this world give more naturalistic performances, with the exception of Jason Momoa as Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison, a former “Gamer of the Year” in—speak of the devil!—1989.

Not all of the humor in A Minecraft Movie lands. What makes it work is that most contemporary absurdist comedies, especially wide-release big-budget ones, have far more humor that falls flat than that works. A Minecraft Movie is the other way around. For every gag that doesn’t work, there are five that do. I laughed far more consistently at this movie than I expected to.

Not all of the characters really work either, to be fair. Jennifer Coolidge appears as a high school Vice Principal, who invites a Minecraft villager to dinner after he wanders through the portal to the real world and she hits him with her car. Director Jared Hess, working with a script written be a team of six writers, cuts back and forth between the Overworld action and this dinner date, enough times to make you wonder what the point of the dinner scenes even is. In the end, the point seems to be only to get to a bit between Coolidge and the CGI villager during the end credits. Well, the bit is hilarious, one of the funniest things in the movie, so I guess it’s worth it?

Rounding out the principal cast are Sebastian Hansen as Henry, a very creative kid just starting high school in the Idaho town of Chuglass; Emma Myers as Natalie, Henry’s older sister who hardly looks like she should be out of high school herself (Myers is 23) and has been hired as the social media manager for the town’s potato chip factory; and Danielle Brooks as Dawn, the local real estate broker with a mobile zoo as a side hustle. Brooks in particular is a known talent who is somewhat wasted here, as all these characters are easily interchangeable with any serviceable actor, but they’re still all fun enough. Momoa, Coolidge and to a lesser degree Jack Black provide the most color as characters, although only Momoa provides a kind of colorfulness that fits neatly into the video-game-adaptation context.

The bottom line is, none of the plot, such as any plot exists, matters. What matters is a bevy of well-executed, adorably bizarre details, such as the villainous borde of cube-headed “piglins” from another dimension, led by a piglin witch named Malgosha. By and large, there is little to no rhyme or reason to anything that happens in A Minecraft Movie, but it’s the execution that makes it work—humor that works more often than it doesn’t; and more actors with charisma than without. It’s an impressively staged bit of organized chaos, set in a world rendered with surprisingly artful special effects. It’s a movie that is ultimately meaningless but kind of a blast, but sometimes a mindless blast is its own reward.

Which of these characters is the most fun? You get one guess!

Overall: B

BOB TREVINO LIKES IT

Directing: C+
Acting: B+
Writing: C
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-

I feel like I should like Bob Trevino Likes This less than I did, but a great cast sometimes makes up for a lot. It’s also possible that I am simply aging into the film’s target demographic, easily moved by rote emotional manipulation.

But I’m also not ready to sell myself short! And great credit and appreciation is due to Barbie Ferreira, a clearly excellent performer, giving the character of Lily Trevino far more nuance than the script asks of her. The same can be said, albeit to a lesser degree, of John Leguizamo, as Bob Trevino, the guy Lily finds on Facebook who happens to have the same name as her wildly selfish—and I do mean wild—dad, and strikes up a friendship with him. Leguizamo plays bob as an understated loner, and has an unusual, familial chemistry with Ferreira as the two forge a very odd but healing relationship. Leguizamo is a veteran actor with a certain amount of well-earned respect; and I pray I get to see Ferreira in other films as characters with greater dimension.

And to be clear: Lily has far more dimension than anyone else in Bob Trevino Likes It, directly because of Ferreira’s performance. With the simplest and subtlest gestures, movements, and expressions, she is captivating onscreen. She took an undercooked part and ran with it, in all the best ways.

Unfortunately, Bob Trevino Likes It is also bogged down, by the character that is Lily’s biological father, Robert Trevino (French Stewart)—a guy so deeply selfish, narcissistic and unlikable that he instantly becomes a caricature. Screenshots of Facebook messages are shown at the end of the film, indicating that the film was—here comes that phrase again—”inspired by” a real experience, had by writer-director Tracie Laymon. Well, to say that she contrived a fictionalized version of the story would be an understatement.

Lily’s father, who has started going by “Robert” because he thinks the women he’s dating prefer it, breaks off contact with Lily when she can’t get the details of a date right when she tags along, at his request. This is when she connects with Bob on Facebook, sending a friend request she thinks she’s sending to her dad. Weeks later, Robert finally calls and asks to meet up, insisting she break plans she’s already made (with Bob), only to give her an itemized list to demonstrate how much raising her has literally cost him.

I had difficulty getting over what a piece of work Robert was, with zero redeeming qualities—forming the perfect codependent relationship with a daughter who has zero self-worth. Do people like this even really exist? Broadly speaking they do, but even pieces of shit have some humanity, and Robert really isn’t given any. Conversely, Bob has a wife, Jeanie (Rachel Bay Jones), a competitive scrapbooker who throws herself into implausibly winning the grand prize every year as a means of coping with the loss of a small child roughly a decade before. Jeanie is more pleasant than Robert, but does not have much more dimension—and she is used later in an unforgivable way. We are clearly meant to expect by her demeanor that she will be cold and unkind to Lily, only to bait-and-switch the audience out of nowhere, suddenly becoming incredibly sweet.

Who the hell are these people? Not even characters in small parts are given any grace. When Lily visits Robert’s home desperate to get him to answer the door, clearly in despair, the neighbors and a cop insist she leave and not disturb any residents, without offering a shred of empathy. It’s like the universe of Bob Trevino Likes It is populated by the soulless—except for the two main characters we’re meant to feel for, of course.

Indeed: feel for them, we do. In the end, Bob Trevino Likes It works in spite of itself. It has an unusual and compelling premise, the kind that can only be ripped from real life—and it’s refreshing that not only is there no romance even hinted at, no other character suspects it either. It would have made sense for Laymon to explore further into the idea of Lily latching onto Bob as a surrogate father, which makes much of the story here far more awkward than it often even seems intended to be. Instead, we all just take it on faith that they’re just friends, apparently with no strange daddy-issues dynamic. But Daphne (Lauren 'Lolo' Spencer), the young woman Lily works for doing in-home care, notes that it’s weird to suddenly make friends with a sixty-year-old man on the internet—and she’s one of the few characters here talking sense.

That said, I’m fine with trusting that this unusual relationship is sweet and rewarding, even healthy. I just resent how the story written to support it is so contrived, to the point of effectiveness: thanks in particular to Ferreira’s excellent performance, I was still moved to tears. I enjoyed watching these characters hang out together, grow, and learn from each other. I was saddened when they shared or experienced loss. I had a mostly pleasant time sifting through the trappings of mediocrity.

We’re the only real people in this movie, right?

Overall: B-