by HAYDEN MEARS
On its face, Nintendo’s Super Mario games seem ripe for adaptation: recognisable characters, colourful locales, wacky plot devices – all of that could have translated to something special. Unfortunately, The Super Mario Bros. Movie amounts to little more than a well-meaning video game adaptation that forgets it’s supposed to be a movie.
It’s sometimes unclear who The Super Mario Bros. Movie is for. Thin writing, coupled with a heavy reliance on unimaginative slapstick, suggests a target age of about nine, which would be less confounding if the script didn’t stake so much of its story on cheap nostalgia. When directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic aren’t inundating us with obscure references, they’re smashing Mario against blocks, breaking his fall on giant (gorgeously textured, admittedly!) mushrooms, and finding other generic ways to coax mirth out of younger viewers.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie isn’t particularly fun or funny, and any attempt to tell a coherent story is lost in a flurry of callbacks. The film’s back half plays like a misguided game of “Catch that Mario reference!” It really just skirts meatier approaches, entertains better ideas without taking them seriously enough to consider them. Jack Black’s Bowser stealing the show from his costars with a Tenacious D-inspired piano solo? Where the hell is that movie? More of that, please.
The movie tries too hard to capitalise on the games’ vibrant whimsy without ever exploring that whimsy. It’s a walkthrough, a speed-run, an insipid adaptation that can’t overcome its impulse to play by video game rules. There are only so many power-up blocks, training montages, and disjointed world-building a script can support before it just feels like a game we can’t play. Sadly, The Super Mario Bros. Movie reaches that threshold quite early in its 90-minute runtime.
It’s not that it’s not having fun. It’s that it misunderstands what it needs to be.
THE SUPER MARIO BROS. MOVIE is in cinemas now.
