The Super Mario Bros. Movie (Review)

I’m going to give you a history lesson. There’s probably not a single human being living in a first or second-world country today, regardless of age, who doesn’t know who Super Mario is. He’s probably the 2nd most recognizable character of all time after Mickey Mouse.

Instead, I’m going to do the correct thing and just review the movie. If you can even call it that.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie was produced by Illumination, but it is largely devoid of the minion flavored shit-tier comedy that infests all of the movies produced by the CGI sweatshop that is Illumination. It seems that Nintendo’s orwellian surveillance of the production of the movie prevented any fart jokes, butt-shaking, or completely inane garbage from entering the scene. And I guess we can all breathe easy knowing that the big N’s iron grip on its franchises is good for something.

But that grip is a double-edged sword. For all the trash key-jingling that Nintendo’s content mandates kept out of the movie, that squeeze also crushes whatever life the movie had and leaves it a cinematic husk.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie is a “movie” in only the most literal sense. It is a narrative presented in an audio-visual format within about an hour and a half. But beyond that? I don’t think it qualifies.

A nitpick of mine is that Illumination is clearly using some in-house automatic character generation to give life to its background characters because any human that doesn’t have a name or speaking role in the NYC scenes is of noticeably lower quality and sticks out like a sore thumb compared to the primary cast. They’re all lanky and generic-looking, with a completely different style than the Mario family, Peach, and Spike. This isn’t the case once the film shifts into the magical Mushroom kingdom, presumably because Illumination needed to design all of the kongs, toads, and koopas from the ground up instead of using aging technology left over from the studios other garbagefests like Minions and The Lorax.

While I’m heaping on some praise, I might as well throw a backhanded compliment in there. Chris Pratt is fine as Mario’s voice. But it only works because he barely talks, and there’s almost no real dialogue between the characters. I actually like Pratt as an actor and do not doubt that he could do some decent voice acting if the part was right, but this part is all wrong. In fact, this is a more significant problem for the rest of the cast, which is more notable. Jack Black, who performs well as King Bowser, is completely muzzled in his performance. I think people (myself included) were expecting something a little more energetic and improvisational, like Robin William’s Genie from Aladdin. That is not the case, unfortunately. Seth Rogen is similarly inoffensive as DK, and probably has the most to do, but it’s clear that Rogen had many improvisations cuts from the film. His dialogue with Mario in the 3 scenes they share is so stilted and hollow it feels like a tenth take on a long day. I’m guessing that the voice director, directly under the spiked heel of Nintendo’s minders, was pretty strict with all of the voice cast. I can’t help but wonder why they went for hiring such a recognizable and admittedly excellent voice cast if you wouldn’t use any of them. It’s like buying a set of expensive chef knives and then putting them up on your wall. They look nice up there, but it’d probably be a better use of 200$ to cook with them.

The character design is incredible and is by far the best part of the movie. Bowser especially looks fantastic.

The Peach “controversy” is also something worth addressing if only because it dovetails with this discussion of wasted potential. Numerous people online, and not just the regular rightwing, gunhuffing reactionaries, were upset that the trailer showcased Princess Peach significantly more so than many of the other characters and showed her in a “girlboss” type role. The final straw was her appearance for much of the trailer in a motorcycle jumpsuit and wielding a spear as a weapon, admittedly neither of these are good looks nor do they really jive with the character. “Has Nintendo gone WOKE?!” the outlet’s screamed in what is sure to not become a super outdated and quaint term in the next five years. Well, usually when there’s a controversy like this (something I’ve talked about before) you’ve either got a complete and total nonissue, a nothingburger, and it’s usually some marketing hogwash. Or it’s a genuine attempt to reinvent the character for a new movie, and often this is done poorly. Before seeing the movie my initial reaction was “When you’re doing an adaptation of a character that has existed for decades, there are probably 100s of different versions of that character but the adaptation should be inspired by the most familiar one.”

But all that handwringing is for not…. why? Because she isn’t a liberal, girlboss, who’s coming to take your traditional Princess values. She’s barely a character at all. Unless the very notion of a woman wearing a jumpsuit for 30% of a movie pisses you off, even the most milkbrained bait vloggers is going to have a problem actually finding any sort of politics in the film. Because there isn’t even a social message in the film, there’s no moral, no lesson, no ambiguity or theme, and hardly even a story. 

But all that could be forgiven if the film felt fun. And for the most part, it doesn’t.

It’s not awful. Like it’s watchable, but it’s the kind of movie you’d completely forget if it wasn’t for the brand recognition. It moves at such a breakneck pace that not a single scene or character has room to breathe. Jokes don’t work because there’s no build-up, with a few of the jokes turning into surreal non-sequiturs because of the lack of context. The film is completely missing any heart because the characters don’t have enough time to talk about things. 

For example, when Mario enters Peach’s castle for the first time, he says I think, three sentences to her. And then she decides she’s going to join this strange Italian on a quest to save his brother. Now I’m not looking for excessive dialogue, it ain’t that deep, but It’s jarring. It feels like I’m watching the cutscenes for a video game that I’m not allowed to play. I guess if that’s what they were going for, they nailed it.

For the action scenes, the lightning pace actually slows down, I guess because Nintendo was okay with longer scenes if they didn’t include any character stuff. So those scenes actually work. The DK vs Mario arena fight, the Mario Kart rainbow road scene, and the ending where Mario is chased by a Banzai Bill are all very amusing to watch. I just wish they’d gone for a more Wreck-it-Ralph approach. That movie has action, comedy, and heart and doesn’t feel sluggish or too dense for kids. It’s a great film.

Luigi’s role in the film is tragically small. With him being sidelined so Princess Peach could take a starring role next to the older brother. But when the characters are this shallow anyway, I have no idea why this was done. He could’ve easily accompanied the two on their way to challenge Bowser, but instead he’s in a literal cage for the majority of the film.

The last notable bummer is that the music is pretty awful across the board. The orchestral renditions of the famous Super Mario themes all sound really bizarre and weak. I can’t help but feel that an electronic soundtrack would be better. Hell, sites like ocremix.org have dozens of Mario music that has been rearranged in far more pleasing and faithful ways. Not really sure what happened here, because this is the one part I don’t think Nintendo can be directly blamed for. The music SUCKS.

The TLDR here is that the Super Mario Bros. Movie isn’t awful, but it is bad. It’s a 4/10 movie but only even scoring those 4 points by looking so damn good. Too bad it isn’t.

Go watch the Sonic movie instead. Apparently Sega really does do, what Nintendon’t.