In 1993, the live-action adaptation of Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. was so horribly chaotic that the gaming giant largely shunned the movie industry until 2019’s Detective Pikachu. Instead of a moustachioed, hyperactive Italian plumber hopping across platforms and downspouts, we were presented with a depressed Bob Hoskins trapped in what appeared to be the rotting set of a Broadway musical production of Blade Runner. At least you couldn’t call it predictable. The Super Mario Bros Movie, an animated rendition of the game courtesy of Illumination (aka the Minion People), is nothing more and nothing less than what you’d expect from a Mario movie.
His comfortable mediocrity is captured no better than in his decision to cast Chris Pratt – the current face of generic, easily marketed heroism – in the lead role. Pratt, it should be said, is perfectly capable of pulling off the kind of outsized performance Mario needed, having previously displayed Himbos with equal, puppy-like panache in The Lego Movie and Guardians of the Galaxy. But the Pratt invoked here is of the mildly sincere, hero-hiring variety, delivering phrases like “Let’s go!” and “mamma mia!” with all the force of a contractual obligation and not a trace of Italian.
This Mario is a sad entrepreneur whose father doesn’t believe in his “crazy dream” of running an independent plumbing business in Brooklyn. He also feels guilty for dragging his brother Luigi (Charlie Day, also very funny in The Lego Movie and wasted here) down with him. When they are both sucked into a magical sewer pipe draining them in the midst of the magical mushroom kingdom, Mario teams with a self-possessed Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) and a shrieking Toad (Keegan-Michael Key) to rescue Luigi from the villain’s clutches to rescue Bowser (Jack Black).
The rest might as well have been written by an algorithm. Peach’s old maid-in-not routine has undergone the obvious gender flip. Mario gets a moment of perceived defeat as he remembers his brother’s love and charges back into battle, in a scene that would be more appropriate for a superhero movie than plumbers. And it’s all accompanied by composer Brian Tyler’s commendable insertions from Koji Kondo’s original game music, as well as some of the most obvious popular music imaginable. There should have been a moratorium on using Bonnie Tyler’s “Holding Out for a Hero” after Shrek 2, but here we are.
To his credit, the film is certainly not as dull and self-serious as screenwriter Matthew Fogel’s naked plot would suggest. The many, many references to Mario lore are charmingly staged – Koopas and Goombas and Yoshis, oh my! – and there are some well-executed sequences, including a Mad Max: Fury Road-inspired version of the popular Mario Kart game. It’s hard to ask too much of a Mario Bros film when its source material has historically been plotless, but shouldn’t we be allowed to ask for something more than sheer competence?
D: Aaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic. Cast: Chris Pratt, Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Day, Jack Black, Keegan-Michael Key, Seth Rogen. 12,134 minutes.
The Super Mario Bros Movie hits theaters on April 5th
Originally published Apr 6, 2023 1:48 am
