I was ready to hate A Minecraft Movie, but you can't argue with Jason Momoa, Jack Black and Jennifer Coolidge

After rock-bottom expectations following a string of disastrously received trailers, I'm pleasantly surprised to say that A Minecraft Movie is a lot more enjoyable than expected. It's not a great movie by any means, but it offers 100 minutes of entertainment for kids and some surprisingly amusing sequences for adults too.

This new family movie, inspired by the famous story-sparse adventure game Minecraft, always had an uphill battle: the game may be played by kids, but its biggest fan-base is adults (bearing in mind that it's been around for 14 years now). A Minecraft Movie doesn't care about these older fans, though; this is a family film through and through.

The story is about a cast of characters living in an Idaho company town who find their way to the fantastical "Overworld" (read: the Minecraft world), and need to embark on an adventure to get home while protecting an artifact from an evil sorceress. A pretty standard premise, but there's nothing wrong with that.

Cue a surprisingly quick-feeling jaunt which alternates between action setpieces and incessant expositional speeches which explain in unnecessary detail the entirety of how Minecraft works. It's an incredibly light plot by any standards, serving as a whistle-stop tour of Minecraft fans' favorite characters, locations and enemies, with only the occasional lip service paid to any kind of narrative message or character conflict.

The movie was a lot stronger at the beginning, when we're meeting the characters in a series of fun and fast-paced scenes in the real world, and I found myself disappointed when the introduction to the Overworld marked a drop in the energy of the film.

The story may sound anemic, but the younger audiences in my screening were constantly excited by the various references to the game, which A Minecraft Movie offers; young fans of the game will enjoy themselves. There was also a surprising amount of peril for a kids' film, with plenty of swords, arrows and explosions flying in the direction of the characters through progressive scenes. It's got a little more edge than most other kids' films, if only by a hair.

A Minecraft Movie | "Be Mine" | In Theaters April 4 - YouTube

Watch On

What might frighten kids, and could give the adults nightmares, is the cheap-looking CGI, obvious green-screen work and horrifying visual style of the Overworld. It's hard to feel a real sense of wonder for a world that looks like marzipan and seems to lack any humanity (or human actors).

If your kid doesn't like Minecraft, this film won't work as well, as you do require some knowledge of the game for the world to make any sense. I used to play pretty religiously in the early 2010s and some elements baffled even me.

It's also going to wash over older fans of the game, not just for its style or story, but by its reliance on 'new Minecraft' references over "classic Minecraft" ones (the video game has changed a lot in its 15-year history). If references to vindicators, vexes and evokers has you shrugging your shoulders, you'll be lost through parts of the story.

It feels like much of A Minecraft Movie is on the cutting-room floor, particularly with the sporadically addressed theme of youthful creativity versus adult cynicism, and two siblings' backstory which is only rarely addressed.

The issues are most felt when there are immediate contradictions between scenes — characters will resolve an argument at the end of one scene and then be at loggerheads by the start of the next, and one character remarked that they wished they'd heard another sing before... about 40 minutes after they had. I found myself scratching my head a few times, before reminding myself that this is a kids' film, where logic is second-place to creeper chain reactions.

Holding the movie together are Jack Black and Jason Momoa as two of the transplants, who constantly compete to out-silly each other in a way that only occasionally verges on annoying — their buddy-cop-style friendship is gently daft in an endearing way. The real standout for the adults in the audience though will be Jennifer Coolidge, who appears in a few scenes as a school teacher. She could reliably bring out a chuckle in the audience in my cinema with some surprising double entendres and one great pun, and it's a big shame she wasn't used more in the movie.

Rounding out the cast are Sebastian Hansen, who gives a passable performance in the closest thing to a lead role we get, and Emma Myers and Danielle Brooks as the two other humans dragged into the overworld — these two are given absolutely nothing to do for the whole plot. I'd put money on the inclusion of these characters being a studio-exec marketing decision, rather than a narrative one.

It's hard not to be muted, it's because it's no masterpiece, but it's a lot better than early trailers made it out to be, and at the end of the day it is a kids' film! Its target audience of young Minecraft fans will enjoy it and the adults accompanying them will have a few bones thrown their way too. It's no The Lego Movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it's not as painful to watch as The Super Mario Bros. Movie, despite attempts to imitate that movie (Black is given two short musical numbers that are evidently trying to recreate the viral success of Mario's "Peaches").

Watch A Minecraft Movie exclusively in movie theaters; it was released on Friday, April 4.