(2.5 stars)
For anyone born after 1980, the Super Mario Bros. feel less like characters and more like a fact of life. Inevitable and welcome like a Saturday morning, as reliable as gravity.
It was no surprise to me or anyone who grew up with Mario and Luigi that the first movie by Illumination Entertainment would become a blockbuster, becoming 2023’s second-biggest film and the first based on a video game to break a billion dollars at the box office. Of course! That movie and its sequel, “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie,” spend little time introducing the plumber brothers and the block-breaking, power-up-grabbing rules of their world. They assume familiarity.
The premise of the new movie, released Wednesday, is simple: Mysterious new space princess Rosalina (Brie Larson) is kidnapped by the son of villain Bowser. Anya Taylor-Joy’s Princess Peach, sensing a connection with Rosalina, sets off to attempt a rescue, while the Mario brothers follow and tag along, hopping across planets to justify the “Galaxy” moniker. Yoshi, the cute green dinosaur that helped launch the Super Nintendo in 1991, is voiced by Donald Glover and depicted to perfection. Others may call his introduction hurried, but Mario fans don’t need more than a montage accompanied by the film’s pop music needle drop.
It’s tempting to attribute the sequel’s likely box office dominance — it’s predicted to pull in another billion or so — to brand recognition, family appeal and nostalgia. All of that is true, but with Mario, it doesn’t feel sufficient. Plenty of things come and go without the momentum of Mario’s little legs. I prefer to call it a shared literacy across generations. I’ll never forget visiting Super Nintendo World in Universal Orlando and seeing hundreds of parents and children discuss Donkey Kong and Yoshi as naturally as their pets. If you are a citizen of pop culture at all, you understand the rules even without holding a controller. The “video” in video games makes their logic visible. Mario jumps. Mario falls. You understand the world simply by watching it move.
As fans born into this world, we can recognize and delight in the motions, but we can always expect better. The modernity of Chris Pratt prattling as Mario and the rest of the cast firing off frenetic fast-paced gags and snark is still exhausting and comes off flat. For decades, I’ve nursed a futile yearning for an expensive silent film starring Mario, packed with visual sight gags. This movie has the gags (there’s an inspired bit inside a gravity-defying casino), but it still does too much talking.
The soundtrack is a casualty of the film’s hurried pace. Mahito Yokota and Koji Kondo created an iconic symphonic score for the 2007 game, but here, the music never has room to settle or resolve. The celestial waltz of “Rosalina in the Observatory” inspires so much wonder it’s been used for the first dance at weddings, yet in this Aaron Horvath-directed it drifts in only briefly, like something overheard. The sweeping, weightless melodies of “Gusty Garden Galaxy” are reduced to a brief leitmotif, just another reference layered into a film already crowded with visual references.
The film is at its best in pure physical comedy, with the brothers barreling through one slapstick situation after another. A bit involving Bowser (voiced by Jack Black), shrunken down as punishment and treated like a kind of living prop, works almost perfectly on its own, especially as the story keeps circling a “will he, won’t he” idea about his possible reformation and growing connection to the brothers.
Mario has always belonged to an older tradition of comedy. You can see it in the way his body moves through space, absorbing impact, recovering instantly, continuing on. Charlie Chaplin built a legacy on the idea that a body can be battered by the world and still rise back up, like Mario, hat intact. Mario has always carried that forward in his own way, growing taller, rounder and smaller, and slipping into the shape of another creature.
His shape always changes, but that motion, so important to the gameplay and his appeal, stays consistent. That balance of new and old has allowed him to move easily across generations. This version, polished and brightly rendered by Illumination, will not be the last, and not the one that defines him. Mario tends to outlast the specifics. He settles into whatever form is needed, then moves on.
The movie loses many opportunities for stronger emotional resonance — the Sonic the Hedgehog films succeed far better because of their strong focus on character relationships. Yet, while watching this movie, I was reminded of the beginning of cinema.
Stretches of action will swing the camera to the side, flatten the perspective and show us Mario running left to right across the frame in clean, readable beats. I was delighted to see this briefly in the first film, and the sequel leans into it further as a stunning visual tribute. It’s the language of games, certainly, but I also think about “The Horse in Motion,” by pioneering 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, and how he broke motion down into frames and miraculously brought them to life through a looping series of photos. Muybridge’s horse running left to right was first captured as an experiment, and video games like Mario gave us full, liberating control of that motion.
Mario games in particular generate joy through freedom of movement through interactive repetition. We may be, as some doomsayers predict, at the end of cinema. But like a horse in motion, things have a way of going back to the start. In gaming we call it the gameplay loop. Win or lose, we choose to stay in that seemingly infinite loop. The secret to Mario’s infinite lives is that we keep giving them to him.
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