The age of clunky, amped up, zoned out, overly literal motion pictures tailored from video video games lasted a very long time ­— from the very first one, “Tremendous Mario Bros.,” in 1993, stretching on by way of such duds as “Mortal Kombat” and “BloodRayne” and “Max Payne” and (sorry, followers) the “Resident Evil” collection and the grandiose liquid sludge of “Murderer’s Creed” and, simply final yr, “Borderlands.” So in a manner that period didn’t finish; the potential to show a online game into a nasty film by no means goes away. Why wouldn’t it? Video video games are the anti-movies. They’ve characters and worlds and narratives and motion and fantasy and spectacle, however they’re in the end a post-psychological kind for a post-psychological age. They lack the heartbeat that (good) motion pictures have.

Through the years, although, classes have been discovered. Overtly pandering methods have been deserted. Steven Spielberg’s “Prepared Participant One,” whereas not based mostly on a online game, had the visible wizardry to place you proper within the gamer’s seat. And two years in the past, providing a bookend to a kind that had kicked off so wrongly, “The Tremendous Mario Bros. Film” was pure mutating eyeball-tickling enjoyable — a improbable video-game film that was additionally a properly rounded children’ fairy story. It demonstrated that animation was in all probability at all times going to be the important thing to bringing video video games to life onscreen. It hit the dazzle-and-emotion candy spot. And it set the bar.

“A Minecraft Film” isn’t practically pretty much as good as “The Tremendous Mario Bros. Film.” It’s not even pretty much as good as “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Amongst Thieves” — which, given the latter’s 50-year-old pedigree, is likely to be described because the analog model of a video-game film. “A Minecraft Film” is only a flaky, spirited, low-hijinks quest comedy that plops a crew of actors down into the Overworld, the epicenter of the Minecraft universe, the place they’ve arrived by coming by way of a portal that appears prefer it’s made from pulsating blue slime. It’s very Eighties, that portal, and the entire film has a retro cheeseball taste, though Minecraft wasn’t created till 2011.

At first, we register how arduous the actors are working to make all of it seem like a breezy screw-loose journey. No matter your emotions about Jack Black (I’m principally a superfan), nobody can ever say that he telephones it in. He’s 55 now, with a gray-white beard as large and boisterous as the remainder of him, and although he may strike you as a bit lengthy within the tooth to nonetheless be doing his joyful dazed stoner line readings, he invests them with a lot conviction — in “A Minecraft Film,” he merely won’t ship a line of dialogue straight — that he spikes the movie proper alongside.

He performs Steve, who at all times yearned to be a miner and wound up falling in love with the Overworld, a spot the place you possibly can actually create something that pops into your head, though it’s going to at all times come out because the cubic model of itself. The place is a surrealist “Lord of the Rings” alt-world paradise that’s additionally as angular, in its billowy manner, because the world of Lego, as a result of it’s made from voxels, which is Minecraft’s fancy phrase for…blocks.

Within the Overland, there are blockish snow-capped mountains, blockish bumblebees, blockish pink sheep, blockish shrubs and bushes, blockish flowers, blockish geese, a blockish wolf, blockish skeleton archer warriors, blockish child Frankenstein zombies (a complete military of them), blockish buildings that seem like gingerbread homes gone brutalist — and, within the underworld referred to as the Nether, blockish pigs, who’ve blockish boar incisors and are achieved up in a manner that means a “Mad Max” biker horde meets “The Darkish Crystal,” all of them slaves to Malgosha (Rachel Home), the evil British swine queen.

Minecraft, in actual life, is what’s referred to as a “sandbox sport.” Like Roblox, it creates a spot for the participant to invent issues as a lot because it gives a objective of “victory.” And so the problem of constructing a film out of Minecraft is: How do you create a narrative we’ve got a stake in if the entire level of the world is just to hang around in it?

The producers of “A Minecraft Film” tried to resolve this dilemma by handing the project of directing the movie to Jared Hess, who remains to be finest identified for “Napoleon Dynamite” (2004). He has had just a few quirky indie follow-up movies and has labored in tv, however watching a self-consciously absurdist filmmaker like Hess take management of a blockbuster monster machine like Minecraft made me suppose, at moments, of Episode Considered one of “The Studio,” through which the “hip” director Nicholas Stoller is recruited to someway create a film out of the Kool-Support franchise. Watching “A Minecraft Film,” we’re at all times conscious that the story is one thing that’s been grafted onto the world, and that we don’t have a lot of a dramatic stake in it — that it’s simply the movie’s manner of cobbling collectively one thing that “works.” (Which, in its manner, could be very Minecraft.)

But Hess brings one thing likable to “A Minecraft Film.” He’s a genial camp satirist who is aware of tips on how to make investments not taking something severely with a flaked-out conviction. “A Minecraft Film” by no means stops goofing on itself, and that’s interesting.

As a film star, Jack Black had a hand in inventing this college of air-quote daffiness, however the shock of “A Minefield Film” is how a lot Jason Momoa will get onto the self-skewering doofus-kitsch wavelength. He performs Garrett “The Rubbish Man” Garrison, who was a video-game champion in 1989 and now runs a nook retailer known as Recreation Over World (it’s filled with outdated video screens and classic gamer knickknacks), which is teetering towards chapter. Garrett is a relic, possibly a cliché, however I used to be amazed at how a lot Momoa, in a pink fringed jacket and heavy-metal locks, sinks into Garrett’s blissed-out cluelessness, his bedazzled narcissism hanging by a thread of determined cool. Garrett and Steve could also be overly related persona varieties, however that’s what makes the film click on — the way in which they mesh and combat like rival dude brothers.

And the plot? Do I’ve to go there? There’s a glowing blue orb — the Orb of Dominance. Which inserts right into a field, referred to as the Earth Crystal. Plopping certainly one of this stuff into the opposite, in a type of “Avengers”-on-happy-pills manner, will permit the characters to defeat the pig demons, and in addition to return to Earth. They have already got the Orb of their possession; they should journey to the Woodland Mansion to retrieve the Crystal. There’s, in fact, a Crafting Desk, through which objects, or steel items, are positioned on it and also you bonk them with a hammer, and voilà! — they flip, with medieval alchemy, right into a model new object, usually a weapon. As enjoyable as these scenes are, the movie might have achieved extra with the mutating magic of all of it. That’s the place you want Jared Hess have been much less of a comic and extra of a technological showman.

There are two youngsters available, Henry (Sebastian Hansen) and Natalie (Emma Myers), an orphaned brother and sister who, regardless of their prominence, don’t have a lot heft as characters. And there’s a fish-out-of-water subplot through which one of many Overworld’s blockish pacifist vegetarian monks — a silent dude with a monobrow — winds up touring by way of the portal, touchdown on earth, and happening a date with Vice Principal Marlene, performed by Jennifer Coolidge along with her over-the-top diva broadness. A few of that is amusing, however like the remainder of “A Minecraft Film” it by no means feels prefer it issues. But it’s no insult to say that, on this case, that’s really true to the spirit of a online game that turns life right into a blockhead model of itself.