The Super Mario Bros. Movie is a cash grab that fails to deliver in almost everyway
The Super Mario Bros. Movie is a tough film to review. As a child I spent countless hours playing Super Mario Bros. on my Nintendo NES. Maybe it was weeks, months, years. I’m not sure exactly, but I have been playing some iteration of the game for years.
I’ve even gone back and played Donkey Kong and its successor, Donkey Kong Jr.. The games are obsessively fun. I played most of them, including the weird and not-very-fun Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii U.
The games are an all ages, generational succubus of fun.
This new movie, not so much.
The cast is fine. Chris Pratt and his silly accent as Mario works for the role, and Charlie Day is a adequate Luigi. Jack Black is proper Bowser and Anya Taylor-Joy is the perfect Princess Peach.
This is one of those movies that had an opportunity to connect generational nostalgia for the adults who started playing Donkey Kong 40 years ago to the kids being introduced to the franchise today.
Call it an opportunity missed. Well, not just missed, but not even close.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie spends so much time trying to reference as many games and iconic Mario moments as possible, that it fails to deliver in just about every other way.
The story is nearly non-existent, the character development is inconsequential, and the journey is not interesting.
The visuals are amazing and the scope is magnificent, which makes the movie even more disappointing that they couldn’t have done more with it.
Diehard fans of the franchise will be entertained enough and the box office will certainly justify a sequel, but most of us will be waiting for a movie that captures the magic of the original game.
Gordo’s Grade: D
