Review: The Super Mario Bros. Movie is a joyous love-letter to gaming's favorite plumber

I didn't expect this to work, but honestly? This movie rocks.

Color me very pleasantly surprised, but wow: I honestly loved this movie.

The film is exactly what it says on the tin: The Super Mario Bros. Movie. Perhaps that sounds obvious, but considering there was a film 30 years ago also called Super Mario Bros. that contained virtually nothing recognizable from its source material, it bears emphasizing. Nearly everything in this new animated film – visually, sonically, and even narratively – is pulled in one way or another from various Mario games and Nintendo history, and it takes a wide sweep in its inspirations, stretching as far back as Wrecking Crew and the original arcade games and as recent as Super Mario Odyssey and Bowser’s Fury on Nintendo’s current hardware, with whole swaths of the film built around spin offs like Mario Kart and Donkey Kong. There is such a palpable love and enthusiasm for the world of Mario pulsing through every second of this film, and if you, like me, are a lifelong dyed-in-the-wool fan of these games and this world – if you have spent more hours than you could possibly count, throughout your life, soaking in all the adventures in the Mushroom Kingdom, to the point where it feels like a second home – the smile stretching across your face from start to finish is going to be so big it’s painful.

Moreover, the film is unabashedly video-gamey; it doesn’t just take the Mario aesthetics and stick it on an otherwise interchangeable Illumination Entertainment movie, but actually builds whole sequences and plot elements around deeply silly, but very fun, video game logic. There are power ups – including obscure ones! – there are platforming challenges, there are pipes, there are Goombas and Koopa Troopers, and so on. The movie does what video game adaptations should do (but so rarely even attempt), and builds its world and approach to action and spectacle out of various pieces of assorted Mario games. Every big set piece is, in essence, a platforming sequence a la classic 2D or modern 3D Mario, with a big racing scene taken straight out of Mario Kart. And it’s creative with translating these very game-ic elements to cinema, bringing the camera swooping in through it all, choreographing lots of kineticism and slapstick, and effectively re-interpreting the fun of these games into a very lively cinematic experience. This unapologetic embrace of video game aesthetics is almost certainly why normie mainstream film critics are hating the film – if you don’t like video games and you couldn’t tell Mario from Link, this wasn’t made for you, and them’s just the brakes – but it truly is one of the film’s greatest strengths.

It helps that the film is very light on its feet and brisk, never getting bogged down in extraneous plot, and delivering just the right amount of lightly sweet characterization. There’s nothing particularly deep going on here, but I don’t think there needs to be. Sometimes the point of a movie is just to have fun, and The Super Mario Bros. movie has a lot of it while also getting in and out in 90 minutes flat, which is extra impressive in this day and age.

Most importantly, the animation is just completely knock-out, jaw-droppingly gorgeous. All of it is rooted in the 3D Mario aesthetic Nintendo has been honing since 1996’s Super Mario 64, and will feel instinctively right to players of the games, but it’s all realized with an amount of fidelity and detail that’s only possible in pre-rendered visuals, versus the live rendering of a video game. So you get real stitching on Mario and Luigi’s hat and overalls, and every hair of their moustaches in individually rendered; Bowser’s scaly skin has a ton of texture and fine color gradations; the Mushroom Kingdom is filled to the brim with foliage and life; and Rainbow Road has never featured such a stunning assortment of colors. It’s a really lovely production that you can constantly feel a huge amount of passion and enthusiasm behind, and it doesn’t look like any other American CG-animated film. It has a look entirely its own that is deeply evocative of its source material, and if you’re a fan of Mario, just taking in the visuals is reason enough to buy a ticket.  

I have a few complaints, but they are relatively minor in the grand scheme of things, and mostly stem from comparison to things the film does well. The musical score by Brian Tyler, for instance, is great, effectively taking themes from across Mario’s history – all the way up to Mario Kart 8 and Bowser’s Fury – and deploying them in lush orchestral arrangements. But as is standard with most American theatrical animation since Shrek, there are a bunch of pop songs unnecessarily shoved in to interrupt the experience, and while some work better than others – playing AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” while everyone builds their Mario Karts at least matches the energy of the scene, while scoring our first fly-through of the Mushroom Kingdom to “Take on Me” is a real eye-roller – each use of a pop song feels like a missed opportunity for more Mario music, and that’s a shame.

The voice cast similarly vacillates between inspired and disappointing. Everyone here who’s a comedic character actor – Keegan Michael Key, Fred Armisen, and especially Jack Black as Bowser and Charlie Day as Luigi, both of whom steal the show – is fantastic. They’re well-cast, they’re comfortable throwing their voice behind a microphone, and they all get a lot of big laughs. The movie stars, meanwhile – Chris Pratt as Mario and Anya-Taylor Joy as Peach, but also, to some extent, Seth Rogen as Donkey Kong – don’t fare particularly well. Their performances are fairly flat, and they don’t feel that comfortable with the medium of voice acting to begin with. Pratt is simply miscast; they’ve written Mario as the film’s earnest straight man, which from a scripting standpoint works just fine – that is, essentially, the role he plays in the games too as the player’s avatar – but it means the part doesn’t play to any of his goofball strengths (which he’s sadly largely abandoned since that first Guardians of the Galaxy movie vaulted him to stardom) and instead accentuates his weaknesses. He never picks a consistent accent or clear direction for the role, and one never gets a sense he has a particular feel for this character beyond whatever number was printed on his paycheck. It doesn’t hold the film back much, because the visual performance by the animators is great and frankly much more important than the voice, but it’s definitely the film’s most notable weakness. Put Charlie Day’s It's Always Sunny co-star Rob McElhenney in here as Mario, get Kate Miccuci as Princess Peach, and toss in Bill Hader as Donkey Kong and I think you’d have a perfect cast of honest-to-god comedy character actors who would be able to disappear into their roles and nail this thing with ease.

But overall? I had an absolute blast with The Super Mario Bros. Movie, and given my general distaste for Illumination’s past films and the broader history of Hollywood video game adaptations, I’m as surprised to type those words as you probably are reading them. This movie is a real love letter to the whole history of Mario, it’s very fun and light on its feet, and it delivers as much as you could realistically want from a movie with this title. In its own way, it takes its video game source material every bit as seriously as HBO’s recent The Last of Usseries did – it just means that instead of a dour prestige cable drama, we get a silly, fast-paced, very kinetic experience. But that’s exactly as it should be. If you have no interest in Mario or video games, this won’t be for you. But why would it be? Why would you want it to be? This is a film that knows what it is and who it’s for and executes its basic goal beautifully. Kids are going to love it, and there’s a whole lot of jaded adults out there who will find their inner child tickled by what the film is doing.

Again – what a joyously pleasant surprise.