The Super Mario Bros. Movie

It’s fit­ting that The Super Mario Bros. Movie starts with a Min­ion in Mario Kart get-up. This glossy slice of kid-dis­tract­ing enter­tain­ment comes from the meet­ing of two com­pa­nies – Nin­ten­do and Illu­mi­na­tion – that hold sway over the hearts and minds of young­sters the world over. With the com­bined pow­er of the colour­ful char­ac­ters of the Super Mario uni­verse and the dark arts of the stu­dio behind Despi­ca­ble Me, Sing, The Secret Life of Pets and, yes, Min­ions, it must sure­ly be time to update a clas­sic meme. Where­as in 2009 it was Nintendo’s cre­ative mas­ter­mind Shigeru Miyamo­to and then-com­pa­ny pres­i­dent Satoru Iwa­ta hold­ing aloft their wild­ly suc­cess­ful DS con­sole, now Miyamo­to and Illu­mi­na­tion CEO Chris Meledan­dri could stand along­side a poster for the film, grin­ning while declar­ing, ​“IT PRINTS MON­EY!!!”

In seek­ing to erad­i­cate the mem­o­ry of Super Mario Bros., the noto­ri­ous 1993 box office bomb that still serves as the worst-case-sce­nario for video game movies, The Super Mario Bros. Movie keeps it sim­ple and plays it safe. Faith­ful­ness and rev­er­ence are all the rage with con­sole-to-screen adap­ta­tions, but unlike, say, The Last of Us, the Mario fran­chise has rarely pri­ori­tised sto­ry­telling. Instead, its visu­al ency­clopae­dia of char­ac­ters and loca­tions acts more as vibrant stage-set­ting for pre­cise plat­form­ing per­fec­tion, with their ele­gant­ly-made games free of such fuss as lore and back­sto­ry beyond a back-of-a-cig­a­rette-pack­et set-up. For going on 40 years, the mag­ic of Mario has been in the joy of play.

And so, this new film is remark­ably slight, super­fi­cial, and short, too, run­ning at bare­ly 90 min­utes long even with cred­its includ­ed. Its wafer-thin plot pits Mario (Chris Pratt), a hap­less Brook­lyn plumber tele­port­ed to the tech­ni­col­or won­der­land of the Mush­room King­dom, against the pow­er-hun­gry King Koopa, Bows­er (Jack Black), who has seized a Super Star and is hell­bent on burn­ing the world to the ground and woo­ing Princess Peach (Anya Tay­lor-Joy) in the process.

Where oth­er brand-exer­cise flicks like The Lego Movie or direc­tors Aaron Hor­vath and Michael Jelenic’s pre­vi­ous fea­ture, Teen Titans Go! To the Movies, both found space to com­ment on the pow­er and pomp of the prop­er­ties them­selves, The Super Mario Bros. Movie is dis­ap­point­ing­ly on-rails. The ani­ma­tion, too, is pol­ished but not excep­tion­al, cut­ting loose in some nice­ly-con­ceived sequences that lock the camera’s per­spec­tive to a 2D side-scrolling plane, but oth­er­wise trad­ing in spec­ta­cle that can only approx­i­mate the rush of actu­al­ly play­ing the Mario games.

Most­ly, that means scenes depict­ing, for exam­ple, a mad dash through Mario Kart’s Rain­bow Road race­course, or a head-to-head are­na bat­tle between Mario and Don­key Kong (Seth Rogen) that evokes Super Smash Bros., remind­ing us of the fun we could be hav­ing if we’d decid­ed to stay at home. At least there, we wouldn’t have to live in fear of the film’s incon­gru­ous pop-rock nee­dle­drops, from a train­ing mon­tage backed by ​‘Hold­ing Out for a Hero’, to a pimp-my-ride Kart-build­ing scene set to the open­ing riff of AC/DC’s ​‘Thun­der­struck’.

What The Super Mario Bros. Movie lacks in imag­i­na­tion and cre­ative flair, it makes up for in end­less East­er Eggs, know­ing ref­er­ences and cheeky cameos. It’s a relent­less bar­rage of iconog­ra­phy, pulling from the whole span of Mario his­to­ry and even scrap­ing the bar­rel of the Nin­ten­do archive. Back­grounds are stuffed with such tit­bits, from sleek glass orna­ments shaped like Pik­min, to bed­room posters idol­is­ing the vehi­cles and rac­ers from F‑Zero, to the pho­tos and mem­o­ra­bil­ia that adorn every square inch of the so-called Punch-Out Pizzeria.

Mario him­self owns a vin­tage NES con­sole, which sug­gests that, in this world, Nin­ten­do instead built its empire on the Kid Icarus fran­chise, while the plumber’s ring­tone is the dis­tinc­tive plinky-plonk jin­gle that her­ald­ed the pow­er­ing-up of the Game­Cube con­sole. Else­where, com­pos­er Bri­an Tyler sets a record for motifs-per-minute as famil­iar musi­cal themes penned by Nin­ten­do leg­end Koji Kon­do and his col­lab­o­ra­tors are crammed into the film’s score.

It’s what the stu­dios want us to believe ​‘the fans’ want, but, for this life­long Mario devo­tee, it is noth­ing short of exhaust­ing. These nos­tal­gic pokes in the ribs only work as a cal­cu­lat­ed dis­trac­tion from just how under­cooked the film is. Beyond its whizz-bang pac­ing, daz­zling sug­ar-rush colours and the odd Jack Black piano bal­lad inter­lude, all that The Super Mario Bros. Movie has to offer is its intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty, and it nev­er con­vinces as any­thing oth­er than a tidy oppor­tu­ni­ty to push both brand and product.

Since the 1980s, Nin­ten­do has built its rep­u­ta­tion on glee­ful, inge­nious enter­tain­ment that delights in design. Con­verse­ly, The Super Mario Bros. Movie is emp­ty-calo­rie, time-fill­ing amuse­ment for the school hol­i­days. In oth­er words, a licence to print money.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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