A belated review of “A Minecraft Movie,” currently the second highest-grossing movie of the year worldwide, has earned $550.6 million globally, including $280.96 million domestically, making it the year’s highest-grossing film domestically.

READ MORE: ‘A Minecraft Movie’ Shocks By Smashing To $163 Million Box Office Debut

“A Minecraft Movie” is the rare Hollywood movie: a massive hit that no one saw coming and the tracking wholly underestimated. Even those pundits who saw it early and said it and said it was terrible (it currently has a 47% RT score)  and yet predicted a big hit because of the way it appealed to kids had no clue, had no idea it would break the way it did (predictions around the $60 million mark, and the film grossing $162,.7 million instead on its opening weekend Stateside).

By now, you’ve likely heard how “A Minecraft Movie,” a TikTok-fueled viral trend, has created theater chaos and become part of its moviegoing ritual, with some theaters getting trashed in the process. Some chains have had to enforce restrictive policies about what you can and cannot do in a movie theater (one audience member even got kicked out for bringing a live chicken into the theater).

READ MORE: ‘A Minecraft Movie’ Shocks By Smashing To $163 Million Box Office Debut

Videos have captured audiences throwing drinks and popcorn; some chains have even threatened audiences by calling local authorities if the bedlam escalates. The pandemonium has gotten so out of hand that the movie’s director, Jared Hess (“Napoleon Dynamite” has even had to defend it.

“It’s way too funny. It’s been a total blast. I’m just laughing my brains out every time someone sends me a new video,” Hess told The New York Times recently. “Just the fact that people are making memories at the movies—that’s what it’s all about. That’s why we do it. I never could have anticipated this level of passion and fun and craziness that’s happening.”

“No one’s going to get hurt from popcorn,” Hess added. “Look, when I go to the movies with my kids, it’s like a popcorn massacre that happens, and they’re not throwing anything, but it ends up on the ground, regardless.”

Now, this is great for Warner Bros. and its box office business, but is this what it will take for movies to become a cultural sensation: to be treated like a ridiculous sporting event? How sustainable will that be?

The strange part about it all is the ironic insincerity of it all because it’s really unclear if anyone likes this movie or just enjoys the insanity around it.

Because ‘Minecraft’ would almost be unwatchable if it weren’t so batshit crazy; at least it’s never really dull (ok, not true, there are parts where I struggled to stay awake) And yet, you know how movies that are so bizarre, oddball and outlandishly weird, are generally such delightful treat? Well, imagine all those qualities, oddness off the charts, utterly bizarre plotting, performances, and story, and weirdness that cannot be contained, but then conjure the bad, uninteresting, mostly unfunny, and uninvolving version of that peculiarity, and that’s “A Minecraft Movie” for you.

Somehow credited to five different writers, Chris Bowman, Hubbel Palmer, Neil Widener, Gavin James, and Chris Galletta, that wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for Hollywood if the screenplay weren’t so unintelligible, nonsensical and incoherent.

Now, people complain about having to do homework for Marvel movies. The confusion that arises when one hasn’t seen one of the Disney+ shows that connects to a Marvel feature, but ‘Minecraft’ seems to presuppose its audiences know the lore, myth and rules of the game and then spits it out at the viewer in expository montages or exposition-heavy dialogue.

Trying to tell you what “A Minecraft Movie” is about, even the basic plot is complicated because none of this movie makes a lick of sense.

The best I can glean is that four random strangers living in Chuglass, Idaho, failing former 1980s video game champion Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison (Jason Momoa), orphaned siblings  Henry and Natalie (Sebastian Hansen and Emma Myers) and real-estate agent Dawn, keen on opening a petting zoo (Danielle Brooks), get randomly sucked into a portal into a bizarre, cubic wonderland called the Overworld (the place where the Minecraft video game takes place), where the terrain is made of manipulated cubes.

Before that however, a complicated, explicatively info dump prologue tells the story of Steve (a full hammy Jack Black), a young man who grew up with dreams of being a miner, who accidentally discovers the Orb of Dominance and the Earth Crystal (elements from the game I guess?), is transported to the Overworld, becomes an expert builder, but then becomes imprisoned by Malgosha (Rachel House), the gold-obsessed piglin ruler of the Nether, another hellish world that portals can access. But not before Steve gets his blocky Minecraft dog to hide the Orb and Crystal back on Earth under his bed.

Imagine “The Lord Of The Rings” prologue, but told by an ADHD-riddled nine-year-old boy and spit out at lightning speed to get it out of the way and get the audience “up to speed,” and you may get a sense of that wtf absurd preface.

Eventually, Garett and his crew—once they’ve stopped their own in-fighting— team up with Steve on a magical quest to find a replacement Crystal for the Earth Crystal that’s been destroyed in battle (get that?).

While Steve (Jack Black in full Jack Black mode) and the arrogant and bitter Garrett butt heads the entire movie, jockeying over leadership rights on this journey, they eventually get it together enough to defeat Malgosha and her hoard army.

Jennifer Coolidge also appears as the Vice Principal in young Henry’s school in a senseless, entirely unrelated-to-the-narrative (but not unfunny) subplot about dating a Minecraft man who is accidentally teleported to Earth.

Directed by silly absurdist Jared Hess (“Masterminds,” “Don Verdean“), despite the fact he has no writing credit, “A Minecraft Movie” has his fingerprints and sensibilities all over it insofar as its ridiculous, inane, wacky, but not especially funny, and feels like it’s being made up on the spot.

While ostensibly some kind of love letter to creativity and imagination—the building of valuable elements in the Overworld is the key to surviving and thriving—the entire movie feels incredibly slapdash and thrown together: a series of “and then,” “and then” “and then” writing from an extremely mediocre script.

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The irony here is while “Barbie” proved that true creativity, imagination, and wit could form a moving and clever story out of almost nothing, “Minecraft” essentially shows the exact opposite: a massive famine of inspiration and ingenuity, just a sloppy, haphazard, incoherent tale stitched together by a few key moments in the Minecraft game that fans love. Even the forgettable “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” feels inventive and resourceful in comparison.

Ultimately, while in possession of a few gags so wtf bananas moments you might LOL incredulously at the ludicrousness of it all, “A Minecraft Movie” is a profoundly empty, deeply dire experience, a hot trash pile of video game memes turned to life in hopes of exploiting popular I.P. and turning a buck. I’m not saying everyone in ‘Minecraft’ should be embarrassed, but the movie’s massive success feels more depressing than usual. This bleak, hot minute feels like a potential tipping point moment in film and culture— perhaps tied to our current administration— where nothing matters, certainly not story or plot, no one gives a shit if anything holds together, and instead, a chaotic collection of winky, ironic, incomprehensible Capcut jokes mashed together a dismal experience, seemingly meant to be consumed as disposable and meaningless nonsense. Brainrot, indeed. [D-]