“Mario, you were amazing!”

With four different directors backed up by the writer of such acclaimed titles as Big Mommas: Like Father Like Son and Minions: The Rise of Gru, how could The Super Mario Bros. Movie possibly lose? Remarkably… it hasn’t… At the box office anyway. Critically the film is getting panned, and deservedly so. I haven’t seen something this incomplete since the last time I bought a Lego set at Goodwill. There’s no coherence to the ideas, there’s no meaning behind anything said or done, and there’s not even much fun to be had if you just want to be entertained. To call this nonsense a “film” is to compare it to actual pieces of art and, though I will use the word throughout this review for simplicity, it’s a gross overstatement of what this garbage is.

In The Super Mario Bros. Movie we follow the titular Mario and his brother, Luigi, as they get whisked away to the Mushroom Kingdom while trying to start their plumbing business. When they get split up during the transmission between worlds, Mario must enlist the help of Princess Peach to find him and gets wrangled into her own plight to stop the evil turtle-dragon, Bowser, from destroying her lands. Hijinks ensue through bad writing, entirely missing plot-lines, completely uneven humor, and some very strange musical decisions.

Before lamenting this drivel, I want to give a shout-out to the sheer volume of Nintendo content they managed to fit into this “film”. It’s impressive that any movie can have so many references to a single platform’s material without alienating anyone in the audience who hasn’t experienced them all. A true masterclass in fan-service. Also worth noting is that the animation is generally good, and the voice cast is a ton of fun… if a little inconsistent. Other than those things, and the half-relief that Peach is written as her Super Smash Bros. character, not her helpless classical version [it’s only a half relief though, because she still exists almost solely to be lusted after], the film has almost no merits to speak of.

Nintendo has the most iconic music in all of gaming, with some Mario tunes being almost entirely ubiquitous across all forms of media. While the film does feature some great renditions of classic tunes, it, just as often, chooses the most obvious and distracting songs one could attribute to any given situation. Weirder still, I can’t tell if the creators were trying to pander to the adult audience that’s known Mario all their lives, or the child audience, who the entire film is both written and marketed for — an audience who should still feel insulted by the idiocy of this moving picture. None of the songs chosen are modern, relevant, or clever. They aren’t bad songs, but they are popular 80’s songs that don’t fit the film at all, won’t resonate with a large portion of the audience, and serve only to make anyone familiar with Nintendo’s music scratch their collective head. This is further offset by the music played during the credits… Which is all classic Mario music… Meaning that the mixes existed… and they just chose not to use them. Of all the things to take from Sega’s success with the Sonic movies, this was a weird one.

While that stood out as the most immediately jarring part of this experience, Mario’s biggest miss is its plot… Or lack thereof. Bowser, for reasons never explained, wants to marry Peach [“bUt thAT’s hoW thE gAmes aRe.” Yeah, I get it.]. His motivations are no more complex than “because I want to”, and that’s not only very boring, it’s very weird in 2023. Yes, Bowser is the villain, but he still only looks at Peach as an object, and one to own… and we’re supposed to find humor in that as the audience. “Ha ha, sad simp turtle-man wants to kidnap/ coerce the sweet princess into marrying him. Ha ha, big funny!”

It all feels very strange.

Adding to this is Peach’s “backstory” which can be summed up as: She’s a human, like Mario, but her only memories are of living in the Mushroom kingdom. That’s it. That’s all the context we’re ever given for her… and then we never, ever, explore or develop it further. So… why include it? There are several examples of this “storytelling” throughout the film, to include the ending where, in a very Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse way, two disparate worlds suddenly twine together. Unlike Spider-Verse, however, there are 0 consequences for this merger and the movie essentially ignores it entirely; choosing instead to almost instantly roll credits and hope you forgot it happened. Though it is entirely possible the film will be getting a sequel [and likely given it’s annoying box-office success], the film doesn’t end on a “cliffhanger” as much as it ends on the finality of the writer’s ability to puke onto paper. What I mean is, the lack of consequences from the combination of worlds isn’t some intentional bit to keep you hooked. The “plot” simply concludes and doesn’t want to deal with whatever effect the Mushroom Kingdom suddenly melding with the real world might have. It isn’t intrigue: it’s lazy, trashy, and cheap.

There’s a lot to say about the shortcomings of 2023’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie, but I don’t need to rant and whine about why we can’t have nice things anymore. I think that all my criticism can best be said by declaring that I would much rather watch the 1993 nightmare film of almost the same name several times a week before suggesting anyone give this pile of incomplete nonsense their money. It feels like there was a 2+ hour version of this film at some point during development that would have made for a more complete, interesting, or meaningful world, but it got axed in the name of audience attention span. Unfortunately it’s working, as the film has just cleared $900 million world-wide. Ugh. I hope that longer version does exist and we end up getting some masterpiece in the future that teaches us the dangers of corporate/ studio meddling. [$900 million world-wide 🙃🙃🙃.]

”In an insane world, the sane are called insane.”