Jack Black still trying so incredibly hard in new Minecraft Movie clip
As The Year Of Jack Black Being In Video Game Movies—and its corollary, The Year Of Us All Getting A Little Tired Of Jack Black—continues apace, we continue to be served new snippets of Black's latest, quite loud performance: His turn as mute default player character Steve from indie video game hit Minecraft, who is now decidedly not a silent protagonist. After the bombastic teaser released back at the start of September, we've now got a new clip from the extremely-long-in-development film, which is directed by Napoleon Dynamite's Jared Hess. Shown off as part of this weekend's Minecraft Live event, the actual bit from the movie appears at 4:50 in the following video.
We will give the film, and Hess, this: The actual look of the thing isn't bad, with the clip in question showing a pretty clever take on the game's central crafting mechanic. (If you watch the longer clip, there's a long conversation between Hess and Mojang Studios' Torfi Frans Olafsson that is actually kind of cool, for an extremely nerdy value of cool, as they talk through things like figuring out how big each of the games' iconic blocks should be relative to the actual human bodies of its stars.) The exhausting part, then, is simply Black, and, to a lesser extent, Jason Momoa, who's partially trying to match his energy. (Sebastian Eugene Hansen seems largely blameless, and trapped in between them; sorry, kid.) We kind of suspect this is going to be the A Minecraft Movie experience as a whole: Looking at some pretty neat visuals, and then getting yanked out of it every time its adult cast members begin to speak/bellow. Say what you like about Black's performance, though: There certainly is a lot of it.