Minus World
As of its auspicously-numbered 13th feature, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, two of the three best features ever made by Illumination are its two most recent films (Minions: The Rise of Gru was the last one), so maybe we stand at the dawn of a new run of quality projects from that studio, during which time it will rise up to become a major new player in the world of artistically pleasing big-budget animation. On the other hand, The Super Mario Bros. Movie is bad, so maybe not. The bar for being one of the three best Illumination features isn't really very high.
That being said, one must pay the film its due respect: this is easily the best-looking movie Illumination has ever produced, according to pretty much every yardstick that CG animation can be measured. It has the most effective, natural-feeling photorealistic textures; it has the most subtle and nuanced and atmospheric lighting. It has the most appealingly cartoonish character designs; it has the most expressive, unfussy but carefully worked-out character animation. It has the most expansive environments captured by the most soaring, all-encompassing cameras. It has the most enjoyable bright colors in a multitude of hues. It has a tremendous number of these things because it has borrowed them all from the recent 3-D games in the Mario video game franchise published by Nintendo, which makes this one of the few times - the only time? - that one can say of the CGI in a theatrical feature "it looks like footage from a video game" and by that phrase mean that it has substantially outperformed one's expectations.
As for all the parts of The Super Mario Bros. Movie that can't be explained by the ever-decreasing costs of rending CG images, or the fact that Nintendo executives were riding herd on the film and thus presented Illumination with the first expectation of delivering something actually reasonable as far as quality goes for the first time ever, well... The Mario games are by no means the most narratively complex in all the annals of video gaming, and The Super Mario Bros. Movie isn't even interested in storytelling as relatively elaborate as what the games have been able to get to in recent years (by which I suppose I mean, since 2002's Super Mario Sunshine, which I am stunned to now realize is part of the first half of the franchise's 38-year history*). There's a kind of a central character arc: in modern-day Brooklyn, a young man named Mario (Chris Pratt) has just quit his job working on a wrecking crew - not even the first of the many, many in-jokes that the film has in store for us, nor the most obscure (there's a blink-and-you'll-miss it Balloon Fight reference) - so that he can follow his dream of becoming a great plumber, along with his brother Luigi (Charlie Day). Unfortunately, Mario is viewed by the entire world as a clumsy screw-up, and this only becomes more severe after are you FUCKING shitting me? "Be yourself, brave little snowflake" kids' movie boilerplate in a god-damned Super Mario Bros. adaptation? Holy absolute balls okay, so anyway, the brothers find their way into the sewers under Brooklyn, trying to help stop a terrible flood. It is extremely difficult to tell from the way the way the story has been structured, but it is at least plausibly the case that the brothers are single-handedly responsible for this catastrophe. Later on, it will be unambiguously the case that Mario is responsible for nearly destroying the entire borough. The film seems to be entirely disinterested in noticing this, or commenting on it. At any rate, in a long-abandoned antechamber, so long-abandoned that it still has working incandescent light bulbs, the Marios... are they actually named "Mario Mario" and "Luigi Mario" here? They're definitely named "the Mario brothers". Anyway the fellas discover a strange green pipe, large enough to walk into, and unexpectedly get sucked away by a magical force.
That is roughly the point at which The Super Mario Bros. Movie stops having, as such, a "story", and replaces it with a 90-minute string of references to 40 years' worth of games, from 1981's Donkey Kong to 2021's Bowser's Fury. There is just barely enough narrative tissue provided by screenwriter Matthew Fogel to ensure that there is forward momentum to keep us entertained between references, though I wasn't even kidding when I said this was less elaborate in its plotting than most of the 21st Century Mario games. There's a giant turtle-monster, Bowser (Jack Black) who wants to marry Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) of the Mushroom Kingdom, but she initially just thinks he wants to invade - and would probably prefer it that way - so she plans to travel to the jungle kingdom of the Kongs, under the rulership of Cranky Kong (Fred Armisen) and his meathead son Donkey Kong (Seth Rogen). Mario convinces Peach to take him with, so he can rescue Luigi, who fell out of the magic pipe highway and landed in Bowser's domain; they travel with one of the thousands of interchangeable mushroom people called Toads, this one a touch braver than usual, and voiced by Keegan-Michael Key). Along the way, whole entire scenes happen where the story is not advanced an iota, but we do get to see bits from one of many, many different games acted out. Some of these are quite clever, as when Mario and Luigi are shown from a side-scrolling view as they race through Brooklyn, with Mario out ahead so he can open doors and whatnot, a mechanic broadly from the New Super Mario sub-series. Some are very dumb, as when Peach explains how power-ups work, using the exact language from a video game manual, one of those moments where the gap between video games and movies as media seems very large indeed. Many of them are just... there, with the presence of a reference blatantly serving as the main draw of the film, rather than the characterisations (which are slender and trite) or the humor (which barely exists).
There are bits of this that are more or less fine and pleasurable: the cast has a pretty successful hit rate, higher anyways than I'd have predicted in advance (and in fact higher than I did predict, though I think I had the good sense not to do so in public). Black's Bowser is so obviously the best in show that it makes the "good enough" performances - Pratt adopting the lightest Brooklyn accent, Day switching between neurotic panic and earnest optimism well, Key demonstrating the film's only consistently good comic timing - seem a little weaker than they deserve to be, but I think you can still draw a line between those and the "not good" performances - Taylor-Joy's atonal performance of the film's most inconsistently-written character, Rogen playing himself. But Black, anyway, is a great pleasure, oscillating between the role's "cartoon megalomaniac" and "lovestruck idiot" modes quite well, and it's apparently largely due to his influence that we get the film's single best scene, where Bowser sings a power ballad.
As far as the unrelenting hits of nostalgia, I guess that depends on your relationship to the games, and to nostalgia as a primary mode of entertainment. I will cop to being very charmed by the score, officially credited to Brian Tyler, though most of what he's doing is re-arranging a simply staggering number of original game melodies, most of them by the legendary Kondo Koji; it's genuinely impressive that so many pieces of music written across so many years, not at all designed to mesh like this, end up providing such rousing movie music. I'm a bit less amused by the sheer quantity of "did you catch that reference? That one? Bet you missed that one" bits, though I appreciate the conviction with which the film deploys them, and its deep reservoir of knowledge: the film's two target audiences are small children, who are no doubt to be entertained by its bright colors and simple slapstick, and people who have purchased every Nintendo console dating back to the mid-'80s, and can recognise some incredibly random asides to things that haven't been part of the popular consciousness in more than 30 years.
Mostly, though, this is just another Illumination animated feature, distinguishable only in that the tech is better. It still has some of the deepest sins of the studio's work: an extremely lazy approach to celebrity casting and joke writing (even Black is, honestly, a pretty lazy casting choice, he just happens to a perfect lazy choice), and maddening pop song interludes. In this case, "No Sleep Till Brooklyn" as the brothers are, get this, running through Brooklyn; also "Holding Out for a Hero" when Peach is trying to test to make sure that Mario can be, get this, a hero. Also "Take on Me" during the extended Mario Kart reference sequence, which I don't even get. It is, when all is said and done, intensely mediocre: prettier than a lot of animated mediocrity, but "pretty" only takes us so far. Far enough for this to be above-average for the world's most reliably irritating animation studio, and far enough for this to be objectively better than 1993's Super Mario Bros., a flop whose terrible reception was directly responsible for Nintendo waiting until the 2020s to get into the movie business. But I'll say this, I have somehow found it in me to gawk at the catastrophe of the 1993 film some half-dozen times in my life; as for the very safely banal 2023 movie, I'm not really sure why I'd ever bother seeing it a second time. There's just not much movie in this movie.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
*Dating from the initial release of Super Mario Bros. in 1985, which I understand isn't the only place you could choose to start dating. Sunshine is in the first half of the series no matter which of the available candidates you elect to start with, and I am a decrepit old man.
That being said, one must pay the film its due respect: this is easily the best-looking movie Illumination has ever produced, according to pretty much every yardstick that CG animation can be measured. It has the most effective, natural-feeling photorealistic textures; it has the most subtle and nuanced and atmospheric lighting. It has the most appealingly cartoonish character designs; it has the most expressive, unfussy but carefully worked-out character animation. It has the most expansive environments captured by the most soaring, all-encompassing cameras. It has the most enjoyable bright colors in a multitude of hues. It has a tremendous number of these things because it has borrowed them all from the recent 3-D games in the Mario video game franchise published by Nintendo, which makes this one of the few times - the only time? - that one can say of the CGI in a theatrical feature "it looks like footage from a video game" and by that phrase mean that it has substantially outperformed one's expectations.
As for all the parts of The Super Mario Bros. Movie that can't be explained by the ever-decreasing costs of rending CG images, or the fact that Nintendo executives were riding herd on the film and thus presented Illumination with the first expectation of delivering something actually reasonable as far as quality goes for the first time ever, well... The Mario games are by no means the most narratively complex in all the annals of video gaming, and The Super Mario Bros. Movie isn't even interested in storytelling as relatively elaborate as what the games have been able to get to in recent years (by which I suppose I mean, since 2002's Super Mario Sunshine, which I am stunned to now realize is part of the first half of the franchise's 38-year history*). There's a kind of a central character arc: in modern-day Brooklyn, a young man named Mario (Chris Pratt) has just quit his job working on a wrecking crew - not even the first of the many, many in-jokes that the film has in store for us, nor the most obscure (there's a blink-and-you'll-miss it Balloon Fight reference) - so that he can follow his dream of becoming a great plumber, along with his brother Luigi (Charlie Day). Unfortunately, Mario is viewed by the entire world as a clumsy screw-up, and this only becomes more severe after are you FUCKING shitting me? "Be yourself, brave little snowflake" kids' movie boilerplate in a god-damned Super Mario Bros. adaptation? Holy absolute balls okay, so anyway, the brothers find their way into the sewers under Brooklyn, trying to help stop a terrible flood. It is extremely difficult to tell from the way the way the story has been structured, but it is at least plausibly the case that the brothers are single-handedly responsible for this catastrophe. Later on, it will be unambiguously the case that Mario is responsible for nearly destroying the entire borough. The film seems to be entirely disinterested in noticing this, or commenting on it. At any rate, in a long-abandoned antechamber, so long-abandoned that it still has working incandescent light bulbs, the Marios... are they actually named "Mario Mario" and "Luigi Mario" here? They're definitely named "the Mario brothers". Anyway the fellas discover a strange green pipe, large enough to walk into, and unexpectedly get sucked away by a magical force.
That is roughly the point at which The Super Mario Bros. Movie stops having, as such, a "story", and replaces it with a 90-minute string of references to 40 years' worth of games, from 1981's Donkey Kong to 2021's Bowser's Fury. There is just barely enough narrative tissue provided by screenwriter Matthew Fogel to ensure that there is forward momentum to keep us entertained between references, though I wasn't even kidding when I said this was less elaborate in its plotting than most of the 21st Century Mario games. There's a giant turtle-monster, Bowser (Jack Black) who wants to marry Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) of the Mushroom Kingdom, but she initially just thinks he wants to invade - and would probably prefer it that way - so she plans to travel to the jungle kingdom of the Kongs, under the rulership of Cranky Kong (Fred Armisen) and his meathead son Donkey Kong (Seth Rogen). Mario convinces Peach to take him with, so he can rescue Luigi, who fell out of the magic pipe highway and landed in Bowser's domain; they travel with one of the thousands of interchangeable mushroom people called Toads, this one a touch braver than usual, and voiced by Keegan-Michael Key). Along the way, whole entire scenes happen where the story is not advanced an iota, but we do get to see bits from one of many, many different games acted out. Some of these are quite clever, as when Mario and Luigi are shown from a side-scrolling view as they race through Brooklyn, with Mario out ahead so he can open doors and whatnot, a mechanic broadly from the New Super Mario sub-series. Some are very dumb, as when Peach explains how power-ups work, using the exact language from a video game manual, one of those moments where the gap between video games and movies as media seems very large indeed. Many of them are just... there, with the presence of a reference blatantly serving as the main draw of the film, rather than the characterisations (which are slender and trite) or the humor (which barely exists).
There are bits of this that are more or less fine and pleasurable: the cast has a pretty successful hit rate, higher anyways than I'd have predicted in advance (and in fact higher than I did predict, though I think I had the good sense not to do so in public). Black's Bowser is so obviously the best in show that it makes the "good enough" performances - Pratt adopting the lightest Brooklyn accent, Day switching between neurotic panic and earnest optimism well, Key demonstrating the film's only consistently good comic timing - seem a little weaker than they deserve to be, but I think you can still draw a line between those and the "not good" performances - Taylor-Joy's atonal performance of the film's most inconsistently-written character, Rogen playing himself. But Black, anyway, is a great pleasure, oscillating between the role's "cartoon megalomaniac" and "lovestruck idiot" modes quite well, and it's apparently largely due to his influence that we get the film's single best scene, where Bowser sings a power ballad.
As far as the unrelenting hits of nostalgia, I guess that depends on your relationship to the games, and to nostalgia as a primary mode of entertainment. I will cop to being very charmed by the score, officially credited to Brian Tyler, though most of what he's doing is re-arranging a simply staggering number of original game melodies, most of them by the legendary Kondo Koji; it's genuinely impressive that so many pieces of music written across so many years, not at all designed to mesh like this, end up providing such rousing movie music. I'm a bit less amused by the sheer quantity of "did you catch that reference? That one? Bet you missed that one" bits, though I appreciate the conviction with which the film deploys them, and its deep reservoir of knowledge: the film's two target audiences are small children, who are no doubt to be entertained by its bright colors and simple slapstick, and people who have purchased every Nintendo console dating back to the mid-'80s, and can recognise some incredibly random asides to things that haven't been part of the popular consciousness in more than 30 years.
Mostly, though, this is just another Illumination animated feature, distinguishable only in that the tech is better. It still has some of the deepest sins of the studio's work: an extremely lazy approach to celebrity casting and joke writing (even Black is, honestly, a pretty lazy casting choice, he just happens to a perfect lazy choice), and maddening pop song interludes. In this case, "No Sleep Till Brooklyn" as the brothers are, get this, running through Brooklyn; also "Holding Out for a Hero" when Peach is trying to test to make sure that Mario can be, get this, a hero. Also "Take on Me" during the extended Mario Kart reference sequence, which I don't even get. It is, when all is said and done, intensely mediocre: prettier than a lot of animated mediocrity, but "pretty" only takes us so far. Far enough for this to be above-average for the world's most reliably irritating animation studio, and far enough for this to be objectively better than 1993's Super Mario Bros., a flop whose terrible reception was directly responsible for Nintendo waiting until the 2020s to get into the movie business. But I'll say this, I have somehow found it in me to gawk at the catastrophe of the 1993 film some half-dozen times in my life; as for the very safely banal 2023 movie, I'm not really sure why I'd ever bother seeing it a second time. There's just not much movie in this movie.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
*Dating from the initial release of Super Mario Bros. in 1985, which I understand isn't the only place you could choose to start dating. Sunshine is in the first half of the series no matter which of the available candidates you elect to start with, and I am a decrepit old man.
