Review: The Super Mario Bros. Movie – Level up!

Directed by Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic
Voices by Chris Pratt, Charlie Day, Anya Taylor-Joy, Jack Black

5/10

What is arguably the defining video game series of all time, the Super Mario Bros have finally gotten the big-screen adaptation…for the second time. Although this animated feature is certainly better, more faithful, and generally less creepy than the live-action adaptation from 1993, it is very typical for a kids’ movie, and it does attempt to tick all the boxes – plenty of fun action, different colourful worlds, a healthy amount of humour, and even some actual platforming fun – but none of these aspects get focused on enough to actually be stimulating.

The filmmakers have done a pretty valiant effort to mine as much story from the games as they can. Mario (Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day) are plumbers from Brooklyn, struggling to make a name for themselves with their plumbing business. But when they stumble upon a mysterious green pipe, it sucks them into a strange new world, full of wondrous creatures, mushrooms, pipes, coins, and platform blocks. But the two brothers get separated, with Luigi held prisoner by Bowser (Jack Black), so Mario enlists the help of Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) to get him back.

One of the film’s strengths and weaknesses is how closely it follows the game series. This sure does look like the game, with all the characters and locales looking accurate. And since Super Mario Bros is a platform game, it’s nice to see actual platforms being used in a number of action scenes, making this feel closer to Super Mario Sunshine than any other in the series.

But this causes an issue for the film, because it’s not a video game. There’s no issue when a game gives you a list of missions to complete, though this doesn’t translate well at all into a film. It really does attempt to make this feel like a platformer, but a lot of the film’s bare-bones story is just Mario and friends having to prove themselves in a kind of test for the approval of others – it gets tiresome the first time it happens, let alone the third.

There is also an attempt at integrating the power-ups into this film, showing what advantages they give to Mario’s powers, whilst also showing how you can lose these powers from being attacked. It’s an admirable effort to include some actual rules to all this CG noise and fury, but these rules ultimately get thrown out the window, and you’re left watching The Super Mario Bros Movie breaking many of its franchise’s own rules (blue shells don’t work that way).

Again, this is still better than the industrial and depressed-looking live-action adaptation from thirty years ago. But while The Super Mario Bros Movie looks very much like the video game series, it doesn’t feel like it at all, not only because it feels the need to abandon the rules that its own video games adheres to, it’s simply a boring and pedestrian digimation film that has very little excitement, character, or humour (but it definitely tried, at least just a little bit).

DAVID MORGAN-BROWN