Review: Take the kids to the rowdy video game-inspired 'A Minecraft Movie'

There's no shame in being dumb fun. There might even be money in it. So expect "A Minecraft Movie," , only in theaters, to hit the top of this week's box-office charts.

You can take the kids since this rowdy video game-turned-PG-pablum is best appreciated unencumbered by maturity. Also Jack Black is in it to keep the laughs coming even when the plot machinery jams up.

Just don't get hung up on the gamer roots of the live-action "A Minecraft Movie" (the "A" in the title assumes they'll be plenty more). Two years ago, "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" did the video game transfer thing in high style and "The Last of Us" won a bunch of Emmys on streaming. So give gamers a break. They just might be onto something.

Though the game itself, where players build worlds in which to battle hostile creatures such as spiders, skeletons and zombies, is the all-time video bestseller, I wouldn't bet on the movie getting any awards action. Sophistication is not an option when you can happily revel in stupid.

Jason Momoa, rocking a hot-pink jacket, excels as Garrett "The Garbage Man" Garrison, a former game champ. He's one of the four Idaho human misfits, including Dawn (Danielle Brooks), Natalie (Emma Myers) and her kid brother Henry (Sebastian Eugene Hansen), zapped into the Overworld where cube-shaped figures—watch for "The Creeper"—scare them silly.

Black, filling his role to comic bursting, plays Steve, another reality refugee who prefers life with Minecraft villagers. Poor Steve gets locked up by the villain, a Miss Piggy wannabe named Malgosha (voiced by Rachel House) who doesn't like all the creative roleplay Steve preaches.

Steve, bless him, teaches that "anything you can imagine is possible as long as what you imagine can be built out of blocks." Here's where then cool visuals kick in, including the "ender pearl," which Steve tells us can "teleport you to wherever you throw it." Sweet.

The goal of the the movie, not so much the game, is to help these players survive the mobs and mobsters in the hellish Nether and return to the real world with a newfound zest for life. There's no resisting a cameo from Jennifer Coolidge as Natalie and Henry's high school principal who lectures students about how she survived 20 years of a dead marriage. That's throwaway bliss.

Here's the problem: In the game, each of us participates in the world building. In the movie, all of us must rely on what five screenwriters and director Jared Hess conjure up. Hess, best known for "Napoleon Dynamite and teaming with Black on "Nacho Libre," throws out some doozies.

But we're all left watching from a distance. The filmmakers are having all the fun. Bummer.

And yet "The Minecraft Movie" isn't a lost cause. Yes, the game's darker underpinings have been diluted with artificial, family-friendly sweeteners. But there's no shame in being unapologetically kid stuff. Not when the theme of salvation through art and creativity hums through every scene. For the length of the film at least, it's once again hip to be square. And cubed.