In Review: 'A Minecraft Movie,' 'The Friend'

A Minecraft Movie
Dir. Jared Hess
100 min.

One of the dreary pastimes of modern moviegoing is to watch a new studio blockbuster and ponder how much of a filmmaker’s sensibility has managed to poke through a piece of intellectual property, like green shoots through cracks in the pavement. In the MCU, for example, you might see how the themes of racial identity and justice from past Ryan Coogler films like Fruitvale Station and Creed found their way into his Black Panther, but it’s more stretch to argue that social awareness of Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s Half Nelson and Sugar surfaces as an immigrant allegory involving the Skrulls in their Captain Marvel. You can be a glass-half-full optimist about the possibility of artists finding their voice in branded Hollywood content. But the glass is perpetually cracked and leaking. 

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Before becoming A Minecraft Movie, a movie about Minecraft went through multiple directors, writers, and stars before finally landing with Jared Hess, who enjoyed immediate cult fame with his first comedy, Napoleon Dynamite, before working a similar schtick to more or less diminishing returns with Nacho Libre, Gentlemen Broncos, and Masterminds. Yet despite the film’s messy development process, which has left five screenwriter credits attached to it like barnacles, there are pleasing stretches of A Minecraft Movie that make the Jared Hess touch completely recognizable. Under different circumstances, this could be another comedy about the misadventures of quirky misfits from small-town Idaho, and a fruitful re-teaming with his Nacho Libre star Jack Black. It’s just, you know, the Minecraft stuff that keeps getting in the way. 

Two wholly committed stars help enormously. The unavoidably janky plot casts Black as Steve, an office worker who had always dreamed of becoming a miner (as one does), but cast those dreams aside when he was repeatedly denied entry as a youth. Newly invigorated, the older Steve axes away in the local mine until he finds a magic cube that opens a portal into the Overworld, the blocky sandbox familiar to millions of creative gamers. When four other misfits, led by washed-up arcade-game champion Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison (Jason Momoa), are also sucked into the Overworld, they have to use their wits to rescue Steve from another dimension called the Netherworld and find their way back to reality. Or something. I’m barely hanging on here. 

If you set aside the game-specific worlds, characters, and references—and, granted, that’s a lot to set aside—A Minecraft Movie basically fuses the gawky silliness of Napoleon Dynamite with the comic adventure of the later Jumanji movies, with Black bringing most of the same energy. That’s not a bad combination, especially in the scenes set in Idaho, where there’s still an artisanal magic to ridiculous moments like a boy crashing his homemade jet pack directly into the giant mascot atop a potato chip factory. Momoa looks like he’s having the time of his life in leaning into Garrett’s cartoonish braggadocio, which resembles that of a vintage ‘80s professional wrestler and matches Black’s manic vigor, which is no small feat. But the cute, Minecraft-specific touches, like the cubist wolf-dog who becomes Steve’s trusty companion, are swamped by other elements that are wedged in to check the requisite boxes. A line like “First we mine, then we craft” might get applause from fans, but the more the game asserts itself, the less this feels like a real movie. — Scott Tobias

A Minecraft Movie opens at theaters everywhere tonight.

The Friend
Dir. Scott McGehee, David Siegel
120 min.

After her friend and mentor Walter (Bill Murray), a New York writer of some renown, takes his life, Iris (Naomi Watts) finds herself trying to cope with his unexpected absence while also dealing with an equally unexpected new presence. A writer and teacher with a history of putting her own ambitions aside to serve Walter — her current work-in-progress is a collection of his letters — Iris is left puzzled, angry, and bereft, but also the confused custodian of Apollo, Walter’s Great Dane. Doleful and strong-willed, Apollo quickly takes up residence on Iris’s bed in her already cramped Greenwich Village apartment and begins staring at her as if expecting her to know what to do. She doesn’t. Who would?

Adapted from a novel by Sigrid Nunez by writer/directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel (The Deep End, What Maisie Knew), The Friend splits the difference, often effectively, between reflective literary drama and a comedy of mismatched animal/human friendship. In voiceover, Iris contemplates Walter’s legacy and their relationship (with the occasional Samuel Beckett quote thrown in for good measure) while navigating a network of widows and exes played by Carla Gugino, Constance Wu, and Noma Dumezweni. Returning home, she has to deal with Apollo’s destructive tendencies and Hektor (Felix Solis), a sympathetic building manager who reluctantly has to keep reminding her that dogs are not allowed and that keeping Apollo around will surely invite consequences.

The Friend is never overly cutesy about Iris and Apollo’s slow-developing bond. (That Apollo, endearingly played by the animal actor Bing, looks like a truly melancholy Dane probably helps on that front.) But it’s also only intermittently trenchant in depicting Iris’s grieving process as she sorts through her long, complicated relationship with Walter. The Friend dispenses details in throwaway lines about Walter in conversations between Iris and the wives and Val (Ann Pidgeon), the daughter Walter only got to know as an adult. They never quite cohere into a portrait of the man or the time Iris spent with him, but that might be the point. It’s Iris’s story (and Apollo’s), not Walter’s. McGehee and Siegel’s measured distance doesn’t always work, but a beautifully played late-film conversation between the two friends brings what’s come before into sharper focus. (If Watts and Murray signed on just for this scene, it would be understandable.) It’s a film about grieving but also about moving on. Whatever debt we owe to the past, the dog still has to be fed and walked tomorrow and the next day and the day after that. —Keith Phipps

The Friend is waiting to be adopted from theaters starting tonight.