I’ve always been quite a big fan of Nintendo games (particularly when I was in my teens), so I’ve always wondered how or even if the games would translate into my other love, movies. After the Pokemon: Detective Pikachu film did quite well, It seemed only a matter of time before Nintendo got their flagship franchise, Super Mario Bros turned into a movie too. Ever since it was announced I’ve been eager to see how they would bring the beloved games onto the big screen.
Plot
The movie follows Brooklyn plumbers Mario & Luigi, who while on a job trying to fix a water leak, get sucked through a mysterious green pipe into a magical world, but are separated on the journey. Luigi ends up captured by the evil Bowser, who is intent on conquering all the kingdoms in the world. Mario ends up in the mushroom kingdom, Bowser’s next target, and teams up with the kingdom’s ruler, Princess Peach, to build an army to stop him and rescue his brother.
Most of the Super Mario games don’t have that strong a plot, it’s usually just going from place to place defeating enemies, and collecting stars until you get to the final boss at the end. So, they didn’t have a lot to work off of when translating it to the screen, which is possibly why the screenplay is by far the weakest part of the film. Things just tend to happen because they need to, to advance the plot, with very little reasoning. For example, Mario meets Peach, they say about 4 words to one another and immediately decide to go on a quest together, despite there being absolutely no reason for her to take him other than the fact that she has to because it’s his movie. It’s very much going through the motions of an adventure story, and adding in things from the games, (like them all suddenly riding karts from Mariokart because they needed to include it) without going any deeper.
Characters
When they announced the voice cast for this movie, featuring every character being voiced by a celebrity, I like many wept for the art of voice acting. Now obviously, the voices from the games are quite cartoony and probably would get grating for an entire movie, however, there doesn’t seem to be much of an attempt from most of the actors to do anything different with their voices. Mario just sounds like Chris Pratt and Peach sounds like Anya Taylor-Joy with an American accent. It’s just a shame because the characters all look great, the voices just don’t match what you’d expect from them. The worst one by far to me was Seth Rogan as Donkey Kong (complete with Seth Rohan laugh) which was just the biggest mismatch in energy ever.
Apart from the terrible voices though, I do feel the characters were all lifted very well from the games in their writing. Anyone who’s played a Super Mario game will recognize these characters. Mario is the energetic hero, Luigi the scaredy cat etc. the only major change was making Peach lean more into more of a girl boss trope than the damsel in distress she traditionally is in the games (which they have also somewhat moved away from in the games in recent years). While I understand the reasoning behind this is to make sure little girls watching can feel empowered by the only female character on screen, I’m getting really bored of this trope. When every female lead is an impossibly skilled badass girl boss, they all start to blend into one and become less original, and it does a disservice to all of them. Peach should feel original, she’s been around since the 80s, I’d have liked to see her as a stronger character without becoming generic.
Animation
While this film lacks in story and voice acting it does excel in two other areas, the first being its animation. Illumination has its own unique style of animation as a studio (see Despicable Me or Sing), so I was a little nervous how that would work with a world that already has an established animated look. I think they did a really good job making the world and the characters look recognizable to how they are in the games, without also just copy and pasting from the source material, which they could easily have done. Both styles were blended and more detail was added to make the world more cinematic but familiar.
I also just love the vibrancy of the colour palette of the visuals. It would be very easy to go for a realistic approach but the Mario world has always been bright and cartoony so they took that and ran, and we’re all the better for it. Even if you’re not enjoying what’s going on on screen, you can’t deny that it looks gorgeous.
Tone
I also very much appreciated the tone of the movie. It’s important to have a tone that is consistent across a franchise, which is why I’ve been critical of Marvel becoming too silly as of late, but here silliness is just what is needed.
Super Mario is not a franchise that needs to be taken overly seriously, it’s always been cartoony and fun. Going into this film, I expected a lighthearted comedic tone and that’s what I got. And it was for the most part, very funny. A lot of the jokes really landed and I think it really hit the nail of being entertaining for everyone.
I can see it not being everyone’s cup of tea, and not wanting something overly goofy. But go in expecting it and I think it’s a much more enjoyable watch.
Game to screen
I think the elephant in the room is whether you can successfully adapt a video game to the screen. For a long time, it seemed impossible because you’re taking the audience from an active to a passive role, which lessens enjoyment. But with recent success in adaptations like The Last Of Us, I think it depends on what’s being adapted. That was a game that had a strong cinematic plot to build off of, whereas (as I mentioned before) Super Mario doesn’t really have that. So I just don’t think it’s a game that can be adapted overly successfully. Yes, I think they could have written and cast it better, but this is probably about as good as we could get for a Mario movie.
I think most of the enjoyment for fans like myself is seeing the characters and the world on screen and all the little references, both visual and audible, to the games themselves. So I was happy enough with what we got.
Future
I think they definitely want to make this into a series of movies, especially as there were loads of popular characters from the games that did not appear in this film, like Daisy, Yoshi and Wario. I don’t know if they’d have a strong enough story to make a sequel, based on the lackluster nature of this one, but they clearly wanted to save something for another installment.
Personally, I’d happily see another one of these movies, because I had fun watching this one. And I think they can definitely do things to improve on what they’ve built here.
I guess it just depends on how successful this film becomes. I’ve already seen massively mixed reviews from both critics and audiences, so we’ll see what happens. Whatever does happen wih movies though, they will continue to make the games and make plenty of money doing so. So Mario is gonna be ok.
Jeremy Greer 