An unpretentiously vapid cocktail of big-budget technical mastery and lack of artistic ambition, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie doesn’t have a story to tell or themes to express so much as stick to a mandate of audience boxes to check. For the kids, that comes down to a series of hyperactive slapstick and action beats. Adults, meanwhile, are lavished with a treasure trove of winking references to well-loved video games of yore.
Matthew Fogel’s script scrounges halfheartedly for an emotional arc from the antics of the playable characters of the Super Mario video game franchise, a series of brilliantly tactile, toy-like games famous for keeping their narrative elements as arch and sparing as possible. Most of the time, the film exists to speed-shuttle audiences to the next visually overwhelming set piece.
Mario and Luigi (Chris Pratt and Charlie Day) are still doing their thing as part-time plumbers and part-time heroes in the Mushroom Kingdom, a fantastical otherworld that operates on the gravity-optional logic of platforming games. Mario has unspoken feelings for Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy), who, no longer a wilting damsel in distress, is concerned with uncovering why she’s the lone human monarch in a kingdom of anxiety-prone talking mushrooms.
In the deep reaches of space, another princess, Rosalina (Brie Larson), tends to a brood of talking micro-stars until she’s kidnapped by the maniacal Bowser Jr. (Benny Safdie). Junior is on the hunt for his delinquent daddy, Bowser Sr. (a scene-stealing Jack Black), who, shrunk to munchkin size and incarcerated in a royal dollhouse for his mischief in The Super Mario Bros. Movie, now prompts others to contemplate whether a bad turtle can change. Before long, it’s off to the stars and an array of toy-centric space worlds for the Mushroom Kingdom gang.
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie doesn’t have a beginning, middle, and end in the conventional sense. Geared at those whose brains are constantly being shaped by short videos, it’s more a loud, overstuffed reel of loosely connected comedy and action beats presented in mind-boggling onslaughts of color and detail. It’s as if it exists only for us to pick out the game-referencing background details in panoramic action shots or admire the follicles of Mario’s mustache as he jumps over floating ropes of fireballs, and to threaten us with us with a Super Smash Bros. cinematic universe, given the multiversal cameos by non-Super Mario Nintendo characters.
Watch Yoshi (a series of high-pitched guttural sounds made by Donald Glover), in a cutaway montage, tear up the streets of Brooklyn. Watch an acrobatic Peach take on a horde of identical Super Mario Bros. 2 enemies in an homage to The Matrix Reloaded’s Smith clone fight scene, where, like the Super Mario Galaxy games, gravity is relative to the six surfaces of a large cubic chamber. Deep-space travel, on the other hand, is trivial in the Mushroom Universe, perhaps because that made for an innovative design theme in the games.
The film has, figuratively and literally, somehow even less gravity than its source material and predecessor. The visual language is divorced from reality and referent to the games; even Looney Tunes action is grounded in the real world—the better to subvert it. The game-inspired spaces aren’t there to be explored and mastered but rather displayed quickly and expensively. And the movie-original settings, taking their cues from Wreck-It Ralph, are literal mass-transit junctions where a maximum number of cameo characters can be worked into the scenery.
Throughout, the characters are occasionally a bit cruel to one another: Mario, the ostensible hero, bullies Bowser when he’s helpless, and characters threaten one another with death. But as it’s unclear if death is even possible in the Marioverse, the stakes in the many game-authentic-powerup-enhanced fight scenes aren’t even as high as, well, losing a life.
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