The Super Mario Bros Movie
It was fun. It was good. Not much more to say than that, this wasn’t groundbreaking cinema.
It fulfilled its purpose of putting a visually-stunning 3D animated movie of Mario on-screen. It was chock full of references to the games, often inserting them into the plot just because it needed to reference it somewhere.
Events flow by quickly, there is very little pause or reflection that a character has. It’s just “scene A events - very brief dialogue about needing to do Scene B - Scene B starts immediately”
Things happen and are shown off with no explanation whatsoever, simply because it’s just a silly reference the fans will get.
Why does Brooklyn have a wormhole to another dimension/planet in its sewer system? Who cares, you already know it’s a green pipe.
What makes blocks float in the Mushroom Kingdom? Why? All you get is a “these blocks are… floating?!” and you’ll be happy about it!!
Why does this group have to make a convoy out of Go-Karts? Who cares, it’s Mario Kart Reference Time!
The voice acting – Chris Pratt’s brooklyn accent was pretty soft for most of the film. Surprisingly he does an over-exaggerated, really good impression of Mario’s italian accent in the beginning of the film, but that’s it. He gives a nice, subdued “positive guy” performance, but it’s nothing to applaud too hard at.
Charlie Day’s Luigi captures the anxiety-riddled shakiness of the character’s voice well. Yeah.
Anya Taylor-Joy’s Peach is… Peach. She has a kind of regal voice and commanding persence to her Toads, and that’s also kinda it.
Jack Black does a great, crazed & angry performance as Bowser, but his voice is still pretty recognizable as Jack Black too. Ehh it is what it is.
Keegan-Michael Key is the standout superstar of the movie. Dude is unrecognizable as the “Leader/Brave Toad” who follows Mario throughout the movie. A great high-pitched squeal of a voice, it’s hard to believe it’s actually K-MK.
I heard Seth Rogen’s iconic guffaw coming out of Donkey Kong’s mouth and I shuddered.
The animation and character designs are especially great. The texturing on Mario and Luigi’s outfits is so neat when in a close-up. The fight scenes are snappy and quick, but have a fun energy to them.
Bowser is both menacing and adorable. When his eyebrows raise up, and you see how big (and front-loaded) they made his eyes compared to his game counterpart, dude made me “awww” a few times in the film.
However, Bowser’s characterization is expected and yet still pretty shallow. He’s got an obsessive desire to woo Peach, and the only reason he hates (or even finds out about) Mario is because he just happened to randomly appear and give him potential competition.
A lot of the characters are very simply-motivated in this film. Only one who really has something of an arc is Mario, overcoming his self-doubt from his own family and making something of himself. The other characters are just there to support.
Oh yeah and the Licensed Music is baffling. It feels like a way to “make the movie cool with the kids/adults” when Mario is already cool and recognizable. Also probably just to have a cool riff to use for a given scene. No idea why they used Thunderstruck other than the cool guitar build-up.
I feel like they could have just used an epic rendition of one of Koji Kondo’s many themes from the series. A lot of the other original music was fun to listen to and were great takes on the originals.
Thankfully the climax fight doesn’t use a licensed song. I was fearing it.
All in all it’s another by-the-numbers Illumination film (that I’m sure Nintendo also had a hand in pushing them to include X Y Z), but very barebones as a satisfying, layered, narrative story.
I will give the writers/designers credit for referencing Jump Man in a sly way.
Mario and Luigi have a rivalry with Spike, their old construction-worker boss who thinks their new Plumbing gig isn’t gonna turn out well.
In Jump Man Mario’s original job lore was that he was a Carpenter. Until later he was officially a Plumber.
I thought that was a really neat, hidden touch to this random new character.
