THE SUPER MARIO BROS. MOVIE - Mark Reviews Movies

The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Universal Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 4, 2023

Mario has been a staple of video games across platforms and genres for more than 40 years. The little—and sometimes big and/or powered-up—Italian plumber is a legitimate pop culture icon, since generations got into or just enjoyed video games in some part because of one of the dozens of the ones in which Mario has appeared over the decades. With such a wealth of source material from which to draw, the only limit to the imaginative potential of The Super Mario Bros. Movie is what the filmmakers bring to it. Their imaginations, unfortunately, are very limited.

Matthew Fogel's screenplay takes the barebones plot of a typical Mario game—the big baddie wants to rule the world and our hero must stop the villain—and then hopes an assortment of references to the character, the game franchise, and some hints as to what could come in future sequels will be enough to fill in the sizeable gaps afforded by the setup. It certainly lets us know that the filmmakers have some idea of all the adventures Mario could be having, in a vast universe of various locales and filled with an assortment of quirky characters. With this introduction to the character on the big screen (ignoring the disastrously strange 1993 live-action movie), Fogel and a duo of directors, Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic, seem content on playing it completely safe.

We meet Mario (voice of Chris Pratt) and his younger brother Luigi (voice of Charlie Day) as ordinary plumbers who have just started their own business in Brooklyn. Watching the two go about their lives of hoping for work and enduring insults from their skeptical family, it's easy to realize why the video games skip over any kind of real back story for Mario and/or Luigi, and none of Mario wanting to prove himself to be more than a joke is much by way of giving an intentionally slight character any deeper quality. The idea of doing so is mostly unnecessary, anyway, as long as the movie understands that we're here for some imaginative adventure.

It's telling that one of the more inventive scenes in the extended prologue set in the real world shows Mario jumping, diving, climbing, and running his way through a construction site, as the camera watches from afar as if his stunts are part of a video game. Horvath and Jelenic take what we know of the familiar action of the games and put it into a different context. Knowing that they're capable of doing this, it's especially odd that the rest of the movie, set in a fantastical world of assorted realms connected by pipes and populated by all sorts of strange creatures, just tries to replicate the look and mechanics of various games, without anything new and whether or not it makes any sense.

After finding a long-lost pipe in the sewer, Mario and Luigi are transported to this faraway world, with Mario finding himself in the Mushroom Kingdom and Luigi almost immediately captured by henchmen of Bowser (voice of Jack Black), the giant, spiky-shelled turtle of a villain with aims to rule the world (His actual motivation—to marry a woman because he believes he's owed that—gives the character a goofy but sinister edge). With the help of little mushroom-looking guy Toad (voice of Keegan-Michael Key), Mario finds Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy), asks for her help to find Luigi, and winds up caught up in the princess' goal to enlist an army of apes to fight against the approaching Bowser and his own army.

This amounts to a lot of traveling across and through various lands that look a lot more interesting than the thin story or routine humor (pointing out that a weird thing is weird, for example) we actually get. One can't fault the directors and what must be a sizeable team of artists for being true to the colorful, diverse, and eclectic aesthetics of the games, although the rigid authenticity means most of the action revolves around Mario and others jumping on, running across, or smashing through floating platforms and blocks of bricks that hover stationary for no logical rationale, except that such is the way of the games.

Such action quickly becomes repetitive, whether Mario is training for his forthcoming adventure or battling Donkey Kong (voice of Seth Rogen) in order to convince the apes to join Peach's fight. When the team takes to go-karts on a road constructed out of a rainbow, it's mostly a reminder that those racing games exist, too. The plotting, which takes us from one recognizable game-like situation to the next, feels as if it's built from a foundation of necessary references, instead of its story, its characters, or even the very notion of exploring a strange and wondrous world.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie looks exactly as one would expect and hope for a Mario movie to look, but that isn't nearly enough here. Most of the movie feels as if it's running in place, hoping that next time, maybe, the material can dare to leap.

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