It’s a curious choice of title. A Minecraft Movie implies that this cynical intellectual property-rinsing exercise is one of numerous film adaptations of the enduringly popular sandbox video game. Perhaps there’s an alternative out there, a sharper, smarter, funnier version of a Minecraft movie. One with actual jokes. Or, God forbid, there may even be a worse iteration, although that’s hard to imagine. What becomes clear is that one of the key elements in the game’s popularity – the latitude it affords gamers to create their own experience – is a big stumbling block for any film adaptation of Minecraft.

In the absence of a single fixed storyline the screenplay can follow, A Minecraft Movie has a cobbled-together feel, borrowing a device from Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle – and, in Jack Black, a star – and superimposing an all-purpose quest-for-an-artefact structure on to a colour-saturated backdrop of cube-shaped vegetation, pink sheep and lax building regulations.

Directed by Napoleon Dynamite film-maker Jared Hess (delivering a watered-down version of the nerdcore quirkiness of his Gentlemen Broncos-era work), the picture follows four misfits: orphaned siblings Henry (Sebastian Hansen) and his older sister, Natalie (Emma Myers); Dawn (Danielle Brooks), an estate agent with a mobile zoo; and debt-ridden Garrett (Jason Momoa), an arcade game champion whose glory days are long past. The four are sucked through a portal to the Overworld, where they meet Steve (Black) – in Minecraft, one of the main playable characters; in the film, a purveyor of exposition and overacting. The villain, a piglin called Malgosha who hates creativity and is obsessed with hoarding wealth, provides an inadvertently neat allegory for the studio bosses who greenlit this egregious IP cash-in.

Watch a trailer for A Minecraft Movie.