A children’s animated movie is probably never aiming to get the audience rooting for a pre-teen dictator hellbent on destroying the universe; even “Invader Zim” makes its alien conqueror a villain. And yet, sometime around the third act of “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie,” I found myself relating to the bratty Bowser Jr. way more than the lead heroes.
The tipping point came in flashback, during which the tiny turtle monster is told a violent bedtime story by his father, with the benefit of crude but charming hand puppets and cardboard sets. Sure, the sequence largely swipes away hints given prior that Bowser was an absent father, but in a film where most of the characters veer toward the blandly nice, watching a dad and his son bond over their same sociopathic tendencies was the only moment that tugged at the heartstrings.
It’s not like this film series has done much to get us invested in Mario and his pals, anyway. As conceived by Illumination and voiced by a lethargic Chris Pratt, the world-renowned plumber is frankly a total drip, a generic action hero with a streak of smarmy self-referential quips in the place of the whimsy that’s defined him as a video game avatar for generations.
His friends, from brother Luigi (Charlie Day) to Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) veer in a similar direction, somehow coming across less fully formed and three-dimensional than their nearly speechless inspirations from Nintendo‘s flagship franchise. When Bowser starts warming up to Mario abruptly, it’s hard to understand why: At least he and Jr. get to have a little megalomaniacal fun, and performers Jack Black and Benny Safdie admirably ham their performances up a little, breathing some life into an adventure that otherwise never stops feeling like the product of someone mashing lifeless action figures together.
“Lifeless” isn’t a descriptor you could ever use to describe the “Super Mario” games, which have been marked by an exuberance and joyous spirit all the way back to the 1985 8-bit days when Mario couldn’t even walk to the left side of the screen. And the title Illumination is adapting, with some other references pulled here and there from throughout franchise history, is among his most creative and wondrous adventures.
A masterpiece of game design that provides endless levels of unique planets to roam and explore, 2007’s “Super Mario Galaxy” is filled with moments of pure euphoric joy — from floating on dandelions through the air to dancing on ice through a planet filled with molten lava — few pieces of art ever reach.
“The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” aims to scratch a nostalgic itch for anyone who grew up with the Wii exclusive via a nonstop barrage of references, Easter eggs, and elements lifted and animated with painstaking fidelity to the source material. You can see NPCs from the game all over crowd scenes, some of the most memorable planets make appearances in the cast’s travels, and many of the most beloved instrumentals are lifted wholesale for the score; you better believe fan favorite “Gusty Garden Galaxy” gets a big showcase. And yet somehow on screen, it all registers as flat, imagination packaged into the most cleanly corporate and focus-group approved form possible.
Released in 2023, the first “Super Mario Bros.” movie felt like a similarly tedious exercise, stuffing so many elements of the games — from Donkey Kong to kart racing — in as setpieces that it forgot to add any verve or heart of its own. With the creative team of Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic as directors Matthew Fogel as screenwriter back, “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” offers a similar mind-numbing experience, racing through pretty sandbox worlds, bathed in nauseating over-lit glow, without ever catching a breath for long enough to let the audience admire the details or make this universe feel like an appealing one to jump around in.
The plot, spread thin to the point of breaking even at a scant 98 minutes, loosely adapts that of the original game. The opening introduces us to Rosalina (Brie Larson, frustratingly underused as one of the biggest on the record gamers in this cast), a princess serving as the protector for the star-shaped and childlike Lumas aboard an observatory that races through the cosmos. With a well of incredible cosmic power at her fingertips, the character is one of the few Mario characters that can be called legitimately “cool” — which makes it all the more annoying that she’s sidelined for the entire film as a plot device, with Bowser Jr. kidnapping her early as part of his scheme to take control of the galaxy.
The action to rescue her falls eventually to Mario and Luigi, having relocated permanently to the Mushroom Kingdom and serving as protectors of the realm, solving problems for its inhabitants. A visit to a desert kingdom lifted from “Super Mario Odyssey” is where they encounter Yoshi, the trusty steed from the games, here voiced by Donald Glover in an unrecognizably froglike voice that’s a legitimately impressive bit of voice acting. Don’t expect him to get that much to do, though: he’s here because he’s an iconic character rather than as a part of the story.
That’s a fate that befouls most of the heroic cast, who are underserved by a tepid script that can’t bother to locate and carry through coherent character arcs that would give this adventure real emotional weight. Peach comes the closest, with an invented-for-the-film connection to Rosalina that she never seems all that stressed out over. The romance between her and Mario is a wisp of a thing that barely registers. Luigi, Yoshi, and Peach’s righthand Toad (Keegan-Michael Key) are largely confined to supporting in action scenes and delivering a comedic bit, which are invariably weakly written and predictable fluff: one of the most successful gags in the movie is essentially a reskin of the famous Sloth DMV sequence in “Zootopia.”
Their adventures feel oddly limited for how boundless the Galaxy premise is, only visiting a few different galaxies, including a giant flower-filled world ruled by a giant queen bee (Issa Rae) and a galactic outpost with a criminal casino hidden underneath. The movie embraces the video game logic of the source material in its world-building and powerups, which is charming enough, although it does occasionally make some slips into reality — such as a glanced over plot point that chain gang slavery exists in the Mario universe — all the more jarring. But there’s no sense of discovery when it comes to these planets, meticulously created to resemble the games without nary a wrinkle of surprise to be found.
The animation style doesn’t help: this galaxy is an impossibly shiny one, where everything gleams to such perfection that there doesn’t seem to be a speck of grit or real texture to be found. The film’s surplus of action and chase scenes follows the same rigid formula of swooping camera movements and game power-up deus ex machinas that no sequence ever proves particularly exciting. If anything, the film only loses energy as it goes on, with the final confrontation proving particularly anemic and rushed, as if the film is hurrying along to avoid having to delve into its storylines with more than a surface skim.
In a decade that has seen superhero movies slowly loosen their ironclad grasp on the box office, it’s grown increasingly plausible that video game movies will rise to become the new moneymakers, the medium’s increasing cultural dominance arguably growing to eclipse cinema’s own. The first “Super Mario Bros.” movie was the second-highest-grossing film of 2023, while “Minecraft” last year proved a surprise breakout for anyone who didn’t understand how huge the crafting game has been for years. Nintendo already has other adaptations cooking in the oven, most notably a live-action “Legend of Zelda” slated for next year.
Watching “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie,” which is filled with cameos from other Nintendo properties, you get the sense the corporation is hungry to announce spin-offs at any minute now. The trailers already spoiled the inclusion of “Star Fox” lead Fox McCloud (Glen Powell), but there are some other appearances by familiar characters that feel like the movie dangling an adaptation of the “Super Smash Bros.” fighting game crossover in front of fans’ faces.
“The MCU, but for video games” isn’t exactly the ideal direction for blockbuster cinema to be going in, but maybe that inevitable adaptation will manage to tap into a well of creativity and fun that has so far eluded Nintendo in their moviemaking efforts. When the film comes, though, I’ll probably be rooting for Bowser Jr. to burn everything down.
Grade: C-
Universal Pictures will release “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” in theaters on Wednesday, April 1.
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