The idea to drop Jennifer Coolidge into the middle of A Minecraft Movie is a decent joke. If nothing else, it forced the parent sat next to me to patiently explain to their child the concept of The White Lotus. In the film – a CGI-slathered children’s movie, adapted from the multibillion-dollar video game – Coolidge plays a high school principal who ends up on a date with one of the source video game’s “villagers”, flat-nosed NPCs who converse in bunged-up honks. She’s reliably hysterical in the role because she’s able to land a line like “we stuck it out for the dogs”, while talking about her divorce, with an air of total spontaneity.
There’s a whiff of desperation to it, sure, but it at least suggests – unlike the vast majority of brands-turned-into-movies – genuine intent, rather than mechanical obligation. In other words, she’s not Chris Pratt. And there are, in fact, early stretches of A Minecraft Movie that seem to justify the hiring of Jared Hess, director of the oddball comedy Napoleon Dynamite (2004) – a brief promise that this could be a similarly likeable tale about unlikeable dorks living aggressively as themselves.
