The Super Mario Bros. Movie Review: It’s-a Series of Easter Eggs in Search of a Story

The film feels like it’s content to check off to-do notes and scratch the viewer’s nostalgia itch.

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The Super Mario Bros. Movie
Photo: Universal Pictures

Mario is the most easily recognizable video game character in the world. He’s also a blank slate intended for the player to project themselves onto. While the worlds that he visits are imaginative and unique, practically bursting at the seams with zany ideas and creative enemy designs, Mario himself isn’t allowed any of those eccentricities outside of the occasionally goofy outfit that he dons and the odd noises that he fires off.

And yet, having a blank slate for a protagonist works perfectly fine in the context of an action-adventure platformer where the draw is the gameplay, which, if anything, helps keep the focus squarely on having a lot of fun, which is the primary aim of the Super Mario Bros. games anyway. Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie, though, advances that governing principle to largely flavorless ends, refusing to do anything original or all that interesting with the gaming icon. The order of the day here is cheap fan service.

There’s some minor exposition at the start of the film about how the Brooklyn-raised, Queens-hating Mario (Chris Pratt) and his brother, Luigi (Charlie Day), feel unloved by their father and wish to prove their self-worth, which leads them to finding a warp pipe while out on a job and eventually landing in the Mushroom Kingdom. Once dropped into Princess Peach’s (Anya Taylor-Joy) domain, it’s full steam ahead, for better and worse. While there’s an impressively breathless momentum to the film, it barrels toward its set pieces with little regard for establishing much in the way of emotional stakes, unless you consider beating Bowser (Jack Black) and saving Luigi from his clutches to be the pinnacle of conflict resolution.

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Far too often, The Super Mario Bros. Movie feels like it’s simply content to check off to-do notes and scratch the viewer’s nostalgia itch. That is, the film is a series of Easter eggs in search of a story. Mario flies with the Tanooki Suit at one point for no reason other than the famed power-up is thrown his way; the obligatory joke is made about “our Princess” being “in another castle”; and all the heroes race go-karts on Rainbow Road at one point. The closest thing to a leftfield bit of humor is that we’re subjected to the terrible “DK Rap” rap in one scene.

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Luckily, the film’s voice cast acquits themselves well. Pratt’s voice work as Mario is cheerful and accurate to the video games, while Black is having a lot of fun as Bowser, Mario and Luigi’s evil comic foil, who, as in the original Super Mario Odyssey, has marriage on the brain (he even rocks the same white top hat that he did in that game). In keeping with some sense of established modern-day canon, Peach, in opposition to her damsel-in-distress origins and more in line with the free-spirited glow-up she was given in Super Mario Odyssey, gets to outshine Mario at nearly every turn. And it’s a vaguely feminist spit-shine that Taylor-Joy revels in.

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Sadly, Luigi gets the short end of the stick here. Since he mostly exists as a second fiddle to his brother in the games, he’s always been allocated the greatest amount of wiggle room in terms of how he operates within the context of one Mario’s adventures. But here he’s closer in spirit to the Luigi of Luigi’s Mansion: as a total scaredy-cat in need of constant saving, and Day really leans into the antic, high-pitched shtick that he honed in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

The film, then, does relatively little to justify its existence outside of serving as brand extension. It’s bright, bounces from one nostalgia-soaked moment to the next, and is meticulously designed to be as inoffensive as possible. But while presenting the long-standing characters of the Super Mario Bros. universe in the most innocuous light imaginable may please shareholders, given the innovative design of many a Super Mario Bros. game, would it have been too much for the film’s story to be a little more, well, super?

Score: 
 Cast: Chris Pratt, Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Day, Jack Black, Keegan-Michael Key, Seth Rogen, Fred Armisen, Sebastian Maniscalco, Charles Martinet, Kevin Michael Richardson  Director: Aaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic  Screenwriter: Matthew Fogel  Distributor: Universal Pictures  Running Time: 92 min  Rating: PG  Year: 2023  Buy: Video

Paul Attard

Paul Attard is a New York-based lifeform who enjoys writing about experimental cinema, rap/pop music, games, and anything else that tickles their fancy. Their writing has also appeared in MUBI Notebook.

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