The Super Mario Bros. Movie Is a Cute, Diverting, Vacuous Brand Extension
The most tastefully restrained thing about The Super Mario Bros. Movie is that it somehow took nearly 30 years to arrive. The signature Nintendo videogame has been around for longer, and some of its characters longer still, but a misbegotten (if interestingly strange) 1993 live-action movie seemed to salt the earth where more Fire Flowers could have grown. Six live-action Batmen, three live-action Spider-Men, and two James Bonds have cycled through movie screens, all in the time it took for Mario and Luigi to find an animated 1UP mushroom.
The time spent on bringing Super Mario Bros. back to the cinema seems less a case of creative perfectionism than careful brand management. The new movie comes from hit factory Illumination, of Sing and Minions fame; it’s not nearly a Pixar-level blue-chip animation studio, but that, too, seems like part of a strategy on Nintendo’s part. (They join Hasbro and Sega in making the jump from toy store shelves to pre-credits cinematic logo card.) Though Illumination has a clear house style, it’s also apparently amenable to being overwritten with Nintendo’s code – which is to say, yes, the worlds of Mario look pretty much as a fan would picture it, translated into shiny computer animation. The colors mostly pop (though there’s sometimes a hint of a peculiar white sheen muting some of them), the character designs are largely adorable (several characters even say so themselves) and nothing looks too eerily, uncannily human.
Even in the movie’s nominally non-fantastical Brooklyn, Mario (Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day) are slightly cartoonier than the family and colleagues who scoff at the idea of two brothers striking out on their own with a plumbing business. (There’s a certain shamelessness in passing off a universally needed service as a pie-in-the-sky dream for scrappy underdog heroes, but shamelessness quickly becomes the name of the game here.) While attending to a plumbing emergency, the brothers are sucked into some kind of pipe vortex and separated in a strange new world. Mario lands in the Mushroom Kingdom, where he meets excitable little mushroom guy Toad (Keegan-Michael Key) and the brave Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy), who frets over an imminent attack from the fearsome turtle-dragon Bowser (Jack Black). Luigi has wound up in Bowser’s territory, so Mario, Toad and Peach set off to rescue him while fortifying their defenses against Bowser.
The initial set-up isn’t all that dissimilar from the 1993 film, which also began with plumbing rivalries, portals beneath Brooklyn, and a delightfully unhinged scene-stealer cast as Bowser. (Jables is following in the footsteps of Dennis Hopper.) But directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic quickly make it clear that there will be no funny business in terms of reinterpreting these characters, and only a little bit of funny business in terms of giving them good jokes or memorable quirks. Many of those come courtesy of Black, who dutifully co-wrote the piano love song he warbles, mid-movie, in thrall of Princess Peach. And some of the game-centric sight gags, like a side-scroll shot through a Brooklyn construction site early in the film, are executed with a certain gleeful confidence.