In 1993, Super Mario Bros. was the first video game to be turned into a movie, but instead of capturing the colorful child-friendly source material, it had an aesthetic leaning towards Blade Runner and featured a lot of fungus. Despite gaining a cult following, the live-action outing starring Bob Hoskins as Mario was a critical and commercial failure, leading Nintendo to avoid the prospect of another Hollywood movie based one of their properties until 2019’s Detective Pikachu. Under the collaboration of Nintendo and Illumination (home of the Despicable Me franchise), will a CG-animated movie do the Mario brothers justice?
The thing about most Mario games is not their storytelling is so loose that it’s really more about innovative gameplay as you make the red-colored plumber jump from place to place through the colorful worlds fighting through Koopas and such to rescue Princess Peach. With film, it needs to be anchored by a story and in this case, a simple one about two Italian-American brothers Mario and Luigi (Chris Pratt and Charlie Day), who have recently started a struggling plumbing business in Brooklyn. As they try to prove themselves to be worthy of any task thrown at them, they are sucked into a Warp Pipe and separated with Mario landing in the Mushroom Kingdom and Luigi landing in the Dark Lands. As Mario teams up with Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy), he must save his brother and the Kingdom from the Koopas, led by Bowser (Jack Black).
Considering that Nintendo has top billing on the posters alongside Illumination, The Super Mario Bros. Movie is a 92-minute commercial for the beloved gaming franchise with the amount of Easter eggs that will delight the diehard game fanatics, from the obscure references throughout the generational consoles to Koji Kondo’s original Nintendo themes. As for Illumination, their recreation of the iconic locations is stunning realized from the Mushroom Kingdom filled with the many adorable Toads, to the Jungle Kingdom filled with the many Kongs that please those who played Donkey Kong Country on the Super Nintendo. In fact, the filmmakers seem to put more effort into the references than the actual story.
If you want to watch an animated movie based on a beloved franchise in which an out-of-place worker (voiced by Chris Pratt) finds himself in an adventure across multiple worlds, The Lego Movie did this a decade ago and was more successful at being surreal, funny and even moving. Considering the surreal sensibilities that the Mario games can provide, The Super Mario Bros. Movie always seems to be playing it safe with a generic narrative that wastes the potential of any character development. Moving at a quick pace, it can’t find an emotional core which should be the relationship between the two central brothers who are separated for most of the movie, and then you think it’s going to be between Mario and Peach, and then briefly Mario and Seth Rogen’s Donkey Kong.
Another recurring issue with Illumination’s animated features is that because they can’t slow down to let things breathe (like in most Pixar films), they try to inject as much humor as possible, and whilst there are some laughs, and younger audiences will enjoy the cuteness from the various creatures, the jokes can also be reduced to the route of unnecessary needle drops. As for the celebrity voice cast, of which their vocals are perhaps too recognizable for these iconic characters, some fare better than others, with Anya Taylor-Joy’s Peach and Bowser being the standouts. Whilst Chris Pratt’s Brooklyn accent is not too distracting, the original voice actor Charles Martinet provides vocals for other characters, and you are reminded who the true Mario is.
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