Review: The Super Mario Bros. Movie
Video game adaptations currently find themselves in a interesting place. Back in the 1990s and 2000s they were often mined for quick, cheap, schlocky action or family films. There was a bit of a lull in terms of game adaptations coming out of Hollywood in the late 2000s and early-to-mid 2010s, but now we are experiencing not just a renaissance, but practically a golden age.
For so long there’s been this talk about there being a “curse” around video game adaptations, and that’s largely been built on the back of those poor quality films from the earlier era. To be fair, even back then there was still some good mixed in with the bad. Films like Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil, and Tomb Raider were overall mostly met with positive receptions and for the most part actually did accurately adapt if not their respective games correctly overall, they at least captured their vibes. Even the much maligned Street Fighter film from that time seems to have found a more positive spin as time has gone on and people warmed to the odd campy charm of it and rightfully praise an incredible performance from Raul Julia as M. Bison.
Despite this even to this day you have people asking if the next video game adaptation will break the so called curse. In the wake of great adaptations like Netflix’s Castlevania series, HBO’s The Last of Us series, Pokemon Detective Pikachu, and the Sonic the Hedgehog movies, I think it is fair to say that there was no curse, beyond the previous eras being cursed with a lot of bad directors and writers getting into the wheelhouse behind those adaptations. So instead, when sitting down to write this review I decided to task myself with answering a new question; does Illumination’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie continue the golden streak? I say it ultimately does.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie does what many of the other successful adaptations do, it captures the spirit of the property to a ridiculous degree. It also helps that the Mario franchise is not one particularly steeped in deep mythos or multi-faceted narratives and complex characters. As long as you have Mario coming into conflict with Bowser in some way, you are roughly eighty percent of the way there already.
The particular story this film goes with is Mario and Luigi are sucked into the world of the Mario franchise via a warp pipe that just happens to be chilling out underground beneath Brooklyn. Thanks to inconvenient warping shenanigans Mario lands in the Mushroom Kingdom while Luigi finds himself in the Dark Lands ruled over by the tyrannical giant dinosaur-turtle Bowser.
Mario teams up with an adventurous Toad named…Toad and Princess Peach, the ruler of the Mushroom Kingdom, to save Luigi. Bowser for his own part has a side story running concurrently with the main story about wanting to marry Princess Peach, as he often wants to do in the video games.
Not exactly Shakespeare, I know, but it doesn’t have to be. For the most part the story is coherent and flows along just fine, if a bit briskly at times. The film hops from scene to scene so fast that often nothing really gets a chance to breathe or marinate. It breezes through its nowadays abnormal one hour and thirty-three minute runtime so fast it almost feels like watching a speed run of a Mario game. The characters are by and large in line with their depictions in the games.
Luigi is spot on with his combination of cowardice and bravery when the chips are down, it makes sense for there to be a brave and thrill-seeking Toad as Toad has been a playable character in multiple mainline Mario games as well as his own spin-off title Captain Toad, and Donkey Kong is the chest-puffing bravado machine he is often depicted as.
Bowser, Peach, and Mario aren’t as accurate, but for the most part the changes to their characters work. Peach has been more than the stereotypical damsel she has often been ridiculed as being in the games for a long time, since the game Super Mario Bros. 2 came out and made her playable for the first time, in fact. She, however, hasn’t usually been this brash, badass action girl, either. That’s usually been the role Princess Daisy has found herself in the overall Mario franchise.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie taking Bowser’s obsession with Peach and turning him into a full blown simp for her is honestly an inspired choice, and leads to many of the film’s funniest moments. By far the biggest change in characterization in the film, and one I’m still not sure I’m actually fully positive about, is that to Mario himself. He’s presented as a bit of a schlub who constantly messes up and appears to be more confident in a way that sometimes borders on cockiness that his abilities can’t back up. This was arguably the one big risk the film took by deciding to give Mario and Luigi fish out of water stories.
In the games the two of them are just…there. They are part of that universe, and Mario’s confidence is well-founded, because he’s very reliable and extremely competent in the games. However, in the end I don’t think that negatively drags the film down at all, and they get so many things right that I feel they earned some leniency in some of their missteps. One such example of them getting things “right” is the sequence where Luigi lands in the Dark Lands. They nailed the atmosphere and Luigi’s mannerisms so well that I really want to see them tackle a Luigi’s Mansion film.
Moving along to the audiovisual aspects of the film, I’ll tackle the elephant in the room, the voice acting performances from the cast. Much ado was made about the cast, particularly Chris Pratt as Mario. Overall I feel the cast did an incredible job. Pratt’s Mario voice is fine, but also just never really felt “Mario” to me outside of a couple lines at the beginning of the film where he does an exaggerated accent as a bit.
Jack Black as Bowser and Charlie Day as Luigi stole the show for me, as I expected them to do when the casting was first announced. Keegan-Michael Key, Seth Rogen, and Anya Taylor-Joy do great jobs embodying Toad, Donkey Kong, and Princess Peach respectively. For my money, though, the biggest surprise voice performance in the film for me was Julliet Jelenic as Lumalee, an absolutely darkly hilarious fatalistic Luma.
Charles Martinet, the long time and beloved voice of Mario and Luigi in the video games, did great with what little he ended up getting. When they announced he would be involved in the film, I really was hoping it was going to be more than the basically glorified cameos we got from him. It kinda felt to me like they gave him the absolute minimum bread crumbs they could get away with, though they did at least have the foresight to put some respect to his name by giving him a prominent placing in the film’s credits.
Musically is probably where some of my biggest praises and negative marks for the film lie. On the plus side for the movie, they use a lot of musical tracks from the greater Mario meta-franchise, and this includes the Donkey Kong sub-series. Some of the tracks are used straight up as they are in the games, while others are fantastic remixes or medleys of multiple tracks spliced together. There are also some original music in the film, including an absolute ear worm of a track that I just dare you to get out of your head.
However, one big issue with the music in the film that I can’t ignore is its abundant use of licensed songs. Licensed songs being used in animated films is nothing new, and is honestly basically a crutch all of the non-Disney studios use even when a film can musically stand on its own two feet. But in The Super Mario Bros. Movie, not only is it using licensed music, but it is using it in all the wrong ways. For starters not a single licensed track used actually matches the scene they are put in. Not a one. It is almost impressive how badly they were chosen. There are admittedly tenuous connections, but you have to tilt your head ninety degrees and go cross-eyed while all the planets align during the solstice to see them.
More egregiously than that, they apparently removed at least one OST medley from the Donkey Kong series that was to be used during the introduction to the Kong Kingdom to slap a licensed song in its place. This makes me wonder how many OST tracks had to be carved out, just to spend more money on acquiring these ill-fitting songs.
The visuals in this film are fair and away the strongest thing in it without question. Not only is the film just from an artistic and technical standpoint just gorgeous by every measure possible, there is an absolute overload of references and Easter eggs to not just Mario games, but other Nintendo properties as well. You will legitimately exhaust yourself spotting something you recognize and then doing the famous Leonardo DiCaprio finger point meme.
One particularly inspired scene that had my eyes glaze over in pure fanboy bliss was early in the film where Mario and Luigi traverse the streets of Brooklyn stylized like it was a stage from one of the 2D side-scrolling Mario games.
While the Mario characters have widely been some of the most expressive characters in Nintendo’s vast stable, Illumination have gone above and beyond the call of duty giving them new expressions never seen before on them. This is the best Nintendo’s flagship characters have ever looked from a visual fidelity standpoint and makes the wait for the successor to Nintendo’s Switch platform all the more painful.
I cannot say that The Super Mario Bros. Movie was devoid of flaws, there are certainly multiple ones to point out. But despite any issues I had with the film, they just couldn’t overcome the pure sense of joy I got from this movie. Watching this movie transported me back to the turn of the millennium when I first entered the colorful Mushroom Kingdom myself on my Game Boys. Wahoo.
