THREE KEY FACTS
Journalist Ed Power writes about culture for the Telegraph.
OPINION
A Minecraft Movie is just the latest dire career choice for the once-credible star. Will he ever grow up?
Fans of the Lego-like videogame Minecraft weren’t sure what to expect from the first trailer for the much-anticipated movie adaptation of their favourite time-killer. Would it be a triumph like 2023′s The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which made £1.06 billion ($2.26b) at the box office? Or a glitchy embarrassment similar to Eli Roth’s recent take on the Borderlands franchise – largely memorable for Cate Blanchett’s orange quiff and the honking absence of a plot?
Everyone’s worst fears seemed confirmed when the 80-second teaser for A Minecraft Movie hit the internet. Live-action and CGI were clumsily mashed together. The dialogue was flatter than the keyboard of a ZX81. Jason Momoa wore a shiny pink jacket that made him look like a 15-year-old ComicCon attendee. It was bad – and got a lot worse when a man with a crazy beard and an upsetting blue jumper materialised. “I… am Steve,” said Jack Black, apparently mimicking Tim the Enchanter from Monty Python and the Holy Grail (“There are some who call me... Tim”).
Nobody was enchanted by Black, who looked as if he’d rolled out of bed, dragged his facial hair backwards through a hedge and then turned up on set. “I went through the seven stages of grief in one minute and 20 seconds,” wrote a fan in the comments section beneath the video. “My expectations were low. They should have been lower,” said another.
Playing the umpteenth video game character of his career, Black looked underwhelmed. Once Hollywood’s favourite mischievous imp, in the past several years, Black has become a pale imitation of the devilish figure who once brought a brimstone zing to cinemas. He no longer stretches himself. Whenever he’s on screen, he’s just playing up to the public caricature of Jack Black – the jolly weirdo with the inappropriate smirk. Now, even that charm is starting to wear thin.
The obvious point to make is that he remains a box office draw – albeit typically for two hours of glorified babysitting. Kung Fu Panda 4, for instance, made over £400 million ($850.96m) on a budget of around £98 million ($208.48m) (a healthy chunk of which presumably went towards Black’s salary). Meanwhile, the two Jumanji reboots in which he appeared have together earned in excess of £1.5 billion ($3.19b) – more than enough to obliterate memories of flops such as 2010′s Gulliver’s Travels for which Black, playing a modernised version of Jonathan Swift’s literary hero, earned a “Worst Actor” Razzie nomination.
Kung Fu Panda 4 aside, though, it’s been a grim summer for the one-time clown prince of Tinsel Town. The negative reception to his take on Minecraft’s Steve (one of the default characters you play in the game) comes shortly after the crashing and burning of the aforementioned Borderlands, in which he voiced the quippy robot Claptrap. Terrible reviews (“an intergalactic car crash,” said the Telegraph) were followed by a swift death at the box office – and a potential loss to the studio of £100 million ($212.74m) or more. So much for that old Jack magic.
Black was already in the red following the cataclysmic break-up of his rock duo Tenacious D. He started the band with his acting buddy Kyle Gass in 1994, long before becoming a movie star. But years of success as a parody heavy metal duo came to an end in July when Gass quipped on stage in Australia that he wished Donald Trump’s would-be assassin had hit the target.
The “joke” was in poor taste and widely condemned. But Black went one further, immediately cancelling Tenacious D’s tour and saying “all future plans” were on hold. He seemed to roll back on this when button-holed by journalists at the Borderlands premier, insisting he and Gass were still friends and would work together again in the future. Nonetheless, his panicked attempt at damage limitation was perceived by Tenacious D fans as tantamount to shoving Gass under the bus for an ill-judged comment made in the heat of the moment. When the going gets tough, Jack ran for the hills, it was felt.
What a sad decline. When he broke through with druggy art-house film Jesus’s Son in 1999 and the fun Nick Hornby adaptation High Fidelity the following year, he was the agent of chaos for which Hollywood was crying out. In Jesus’s Son – adapted from the Denis Johnson substance abuse quasi-memoir of the same name – he plays a lunatic hospital orderly who snaffles hallucinogens like Pop-Tarts. In High Fidelity, he offset the movie’s self-congratulatory air with his portrayal of an elitist record store employee – a universal archetype to which he brought a gleeful comedic touch.
He was just getting started. Black’s ability to be cuddly and edgy was the magic ingredient in Richard Linklater’s School of Rock in 2004 – a sort of head-banger version of Dead Poets Society, which Black elevated with a feel-good yet unsentimental performance. He had that same deranged energy in Ben Stiller’s Hollywood parody Tropic Thunder from 2008, where he sent himself up as a drug-addled comedian who owes his prominence to his facility for fart jokes.
In a cast that included Robert Downey Jr. and Tom Cruise, Black held his own. Alas, this would prove the high watermark. Later that year, he voiced the lead character in the first of the forgettable Kung Fu Panda cartoons. The franchise has now made over US$2 billion ($3.24b) at the global box office, bolstering Black’s reported US$50 million ($80.96m) fortune. But it set a once-edgy performer on the road to becoming a glorified, highly paid host of kids’ parties. (When it was announced earlier this year that he would be promoting Kung Fu Panda 4 by presenting CBeebies Storytime it felt like just another box ticked.)
Black has had a few bright moments since. He brilliantly portrayed the villainous Bowser in Super Mario Bros. Movie, from which his comedy piano ballad Peaches went semi-viral. He’s also in negotiations to appear in a remake of the late Nineties giant snake movie Anaconda opposite Paul Rudd; it may be fun, but seems unlikely to trouble the Oscars.
But first comes A Minecraft Movie, due for release in April 2025. Gamers are braced for the worst. Black seems on the same wavelength, judging by the blockbusting levels of boredom evident in his Steve cameo. The actor once admitted he tries not to make too much of an effort when touring with Tenacious D. “Sometimes, it’s good to not try so hard… This may be bad advice, but I like to phone it in sometimes.”
Phoning it in might work when clowning around with your comedy death metal side project. However, it isn’t doing Black any favours in his acting career, where he has found a tragic niche as an expensive children’s entertainer. He has the talent to be a proper grown-up actor once again. But if he continues snaffling up pay cheques in dire video game adaptations, it’s hard not to suspect his life in Hollywood will eventually reach the “game over” stage.
From where to get the best view to when the roads will close.