Block Party: “A Minecraft Movie,” “The Friend,” and “Hell of a Summer”

A MINECRAFT MOVIE

In his role as Steve, the miner (as opposed to minor) character at the heart of A Minecraft Movie, Jack Black is almost ferally over the top.

Beginning with his roughly five-minute voice-over that establishes Steve's backstory and details how the guy effectively found his way inside a video game, the comic actor doesn't read lines here; he detonates them, each accented word somehow louder and more explosive than the one that came before. Every nugget of exposition Black delivers isn't important so much as the most important thing ever said in human history, and as the film progresses, Black augments his proclamations with heroic hands-on-hips poses, madly popped eyes, and eyebrow gymnastics to underscore the life-altering majesty of it all. Even his asides are huge, and when you add Black going full Tenacious D on a number of tunes (most of which he co-wrote), it's hard to imagine a more heedless, wildly overscaled performance. Given the context, it's absolute bliss.

Director Jared Hess' casting of Black – the star of his 2006 luchador comedy Nacho Libre – is, in  itself, an inspired visual choice. Who better to navigate a world of blocky creatures and cube-filled landscapes than the roundest actor on Earth? But Black's intentional too-muchness and inherent sweetness yield additional dividends, because in A Minecraft Movie, the man becomes the very embodiment of the feeling that youths (and more than a few adults) get while playing video games. The stakes may be low – these are, after all, games – and the scenarios ridiculous. In the moment, however, a player's actions and surroundings tend to feel momentous. There's a reason people shriek with frustration and rage when their avatars die. Yet no one I know goes so far as to give up on a game they're enjoying; they return to it again and again, happily, in the hopes of greater success. Black's portrayal of Steve captures the emotional investment and occasionally manic energy of the game-play high, but it also speaks to the activity's optimism and joy and sense of discovery. This description may sound awfully highfalutin' given that the project he's in is little more than an unpretentious goofball slapstick for kids, or those who, for 100 minutes, agree to be wholly in touch with their inner kid. But Jack Black is astounding in Hess' latest, and unlike most video games, he's riotously funny, to boot.

If A Minecraft Movie never approaches the transcendence of its star, that's okay – partly because Steve is around a lot, and partly because what the film lacks in consistency is handily made up for in abject silliness. Far more well-remembered than Nacho Libre is, of course, Hess' Napoleon Dynamite, the 2004 deadpan oddity that gets Easter Egg-ed all over the place here. From the initial Utah setting to the tater-tot obsession to the unexpected appearance of a llama, ND DNA is in abundance, and Jason Momoa, playing former video-game champ Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison, would've fit snugly into that universe, as well. Suggesting a Billy Mitchell whose diet is composed solely of protein shakes, Momoa's stuck-in-the-'80s has-been – a vainglorious buffoon terrified that his loserdom is apparent to all – is a plum comic role, and the actor appears to be having a blast. Even better than Garrett's faux heroics, though, are the nutty grace notes that Hess' seven (!) screenwriters and “story by” contributors provide for Momoa: Garrett bickering with the awed leader of the local “storage community” who fantasizes about matching turquoise blouses; Garrett's subtly aghast reaction upon consuming “lava chicken.”

Even when his gags don't land, Momoa is an utter delight. And he's certainly more entertaining company than the three others who accompany Garrett to Steve's video-game realm the Overworld: the brother-and-sister team of Henry and Natalie (Sebastian Hansen and Emma Myers), neither of whom is allowed any true personality, and real-estate agent Dawn (Danielle Brooks), whose side hustle as operator of a traveling petting zoo is a very Jared Hess touch but also an incredibly missed opportunity. The animals don't even enter the Overworld with her! (Another missed opportunity: Grammy winner Brooks, who scored Oscar and Tony nominations for playing Sofia in the Color Purple musical, never gets to sing. You just know Jack Black would've been up for a duet if the idea were presented.) Henry, Natalie, and Dawn represent the film's most significant overall disappointment, because they're exactly the sorts of disposable figures you'd expect from a big-budgeted Hollywood take on IP: serviceable, prototypical, deeply uninteresting.

The same, unfortunately, can be said about most of the action sequences, which, after the prelude, hardly approach the imagination on view in your average game of Minecraft. Scores of piglins and creepers and zombies may attack, yet the melees don't boast much visual distinction or inventiveness, and even the appearance of the Great Hog barely musters a tingle. Despite how gratifyingly eccentric and unusual A Minecraft Movie is during its first half-hour, it's disappointingly dull when Black and Momoa aren't going to town on their comic bits. And I really don't know what the screenwriters were thinking in their routine detours back to Utah, with Jennifer Coolidge playing a randy divorcée who hits an escaped Overworld villager with her car and invites him on a date. (Don't ask.) Coolidge is reliably gonzo, but her scenes do nothing but detract from the fast-paced video-game nonsense, and until the mid-credits kicker at the end, they're unfunny besides. Wikipedia's plot synopsis for the film is 659 words long, and Coolidge's character and subplot aren't referenced even once. There's a reason for that.

Still, A Minecraft Movie is too innocuous to get in a dither about, and its deficiencies don't really matter in the face of so much outlandish Jack Black zeal. I should also note that, at our late-afternoon Friday screening, the 10-year-old Minecraft fanatic to my right had a complete ball, while her folks and I frequently laughed out loud, especially at a priceless routine between Steve and his chief nemesis brilliantly reserved for the final 10 minutes. This unanticipated blockbuster – $310 million worldwide in three days! – may not be entirely deserving of its remarkable weekend haul. But it has way more character than the soulless The Super Mario Bros. Movie from a couple years ago and a far more distinct comic vision, and it's nice to know that, 21 years later, Jared Hess is still delivering occasional blasts of Dynamite.

THE FRIEND

“Does the dog die?” I can't tell you how many times I've fielded that question from friends whenever I see a canine-themed release that, based on the trailers, is obviously not going to be Beethoven's 2nd. Clearly traumatized by the likes of Old Yeller, Where the Red Fern Grows, and Marley & Me, these anxious askers don't merely want but need to know if there's going to be a puppy passing ahead, in which case they won't see said movie in a million years. (A numeric sentiment expressed by a pal just a few days ago.) Consequently, I should probably begin my discussion of The Friend by addressing the inevitable query head on, and what I'll say is … no comment. But I will say that writer/directors Scott McGehee's and David Siegel's engaging, affecting adaptation of Sigrid Nunez's National Book Award-winning bestseller is (a) a drama (b) about grief (c) co-starring a Great Dane (d) in his later years (e) whose breed tends to have a shorter lifespan than most. You now probably know everything you need to, though I will add that, blessedly, I didn't need a box of Kleenex to get through the film. One or two individual tissues would've sufficed.

Although Naomi Watts was a hauntingly poignant presence in last year's limited series Feud: Capote vs. the Swans – the image of her Babe Paley blowing Truman a kiss on a NYC sidewalk forever etched in memory – it's been a while since the performer enjoyed a role as strong and complex as the one she has in The Friend. Here, she's struggling novelist Iris, whose difficulty in completing her latest writing projects is compounded by her inability to accept the suicide of her beloved mentor Walter (Bill Murray). To her shock and dismay, Walter evidently left her a parting gift: an aging, arthritic, 150-pound Great Dane named Apollo whom he hoped Iris would care for after his death. Given that she lives in a Manhattan apartment whose owners forbid dogs, this leaves Iris in a pickle. But take Apollo in she does, and McGehee's and Siegel's adaptation subsequently concerns Iris' efforts in securing the dog a more appropriate home while inevitably falling more and more in love with the sad-eyed beast who appears to be suffering as much as she is.

It'd take more than the fingers of one hand to count the number of dog people in my life who, upon reading that synopsis, will promptly reply “No thank you” and either skip to the next review or escape this Web site altogether. I can't really blame them. Even though The Friend isn't at all grim, it is filled to brimming with downbeat-pup reaction shots, and it's hard not to get choked up when Watts' masterfully directed co-star – played by area-dog-made-good Bing from Newton, Iowa – howls in apparent memory of his departed master. Yet while the film doesn't go overboard with its moments of physical comedy, Apollo clearly outweighing Iris and more than half her height, the size disparity and samplings of nimble comic dialogue routinely make the experience breezy, and even close to lighthearted. If anything, what McGehee's and Siegel's outing most resembles is one of those smart, sophisticated urban comedies by Nicole Holofcener, or even the Woody Allen of three or four decades ago – Bing, however, taking on a role that might've otherwise gone to Julia Louis-Dreyfus or Dianne Wiest.

As in many of Holofcener's and Allen's upscale works involving privileged New Yorkers, the more peripheral supporting characters – aside from the terrific Carla Gugino as Walter's first wife – tend to be rather blithely designed and performed. Constance Wu is distractingly one-dimensional as Walter's brittle second wife of three, and Norma Dumezweni, Sarah Pidgeon, and Ann Dowd have to fight some lackluster material as others in Iris' orbit. Yet Murray, popping up mostly in flashbacks, both looks and sounds like a great author who has let his talent go largely to seed. (Between this and his undersung, legitimately frightening comic turn in Riff Raff, it's already been a first-rate movie year for Bill.) Watts does a marvelous job of detailing Iris' dovetailing professional and personal crises – even going so far as to appear unlikable – while remaining steadfastly empathetic. And enough can't be said about Bing, who pulls off familiar situations with artfully lumbering ease, and whose casting in The Friend seems peerless even beyond the role's physical requirements. Apollo doesn't merely seem like a dead man's devoted companion; he seems like Bill Murray's devoted companion. Squint a bit, and their (no pun intended) hangdog expressions even look alike. Outfit Bing with a Proton Pack and you've got yourself the best-ever Ghostbusters sequel.

HELL OF A SUMMER

Written and directed by two of its co-stars, Billy Bryk and Finn Wolfhard, the horror comedy Hell of a Summer is basically Friday the 13th viewed through a Scream lens, and in the words of legendary New Yorker reviewer Pauline Kael, it's the kind of movie that “isn't worth more than a critic's paragraph.” Notorious contrarian that she was, the film Kael made that comment about was, of all things, Speed, which is definitely worth more than a paragraph. But it would be hard to argue with Pauline in regard to Bryk's and Wolfhard's low-budget Neon outing, which is alternately agreeably slapdash and annoyingly amateurish, none of its murders or attempts at tension equaling the light suspense involved in watching the summer camp's sole vegan consider the unholy option of a hamburger. Suffice it to say that while you won't get much from the experience as a fright flick, and probably won't find Hell of a Summer in any way artistically or even professionally rendered, this thing does have a more-than-decent cast, and you just might laugh – a lot. The omnipresent Fred Hechinger is endearing and funny as a 24-year-old dork hoping to finally land his dream job as senior camp counselor. Bryk is riotous as a wannabe lothario convinced that he's not being murdered because the psycho doesn't think he's attractive enough. And Matthew Finlan, as token theatre geek Ezra, is a flamboyant godsend. With this kid on the maniac's radar while dreamily lost in a soliloquy, a nearby friend screams at Ezra that the killer is right there and he should run to the left. Poor Ezra is hopelessly confused. “Stage left?!”