In retrospect, it’s both understandable and kind of weird that Chris Pratt’s casting was seen as the main issue with making a modern-day Super Mario Bros. movie. Pratt’s steady descent from beloved sitcom co-star turned box office draw to the internet’s most loathed Chris meant that, outside of a few franchises he’d already established himself in, like the Guardians trilogy or the Jurassic World series, would attract some level of scrutiny no matter what the project was. But the fusion of beloved geek property — with an iconic voice, to boot, which he definitely did not sound like — and his accumulated infamy inspired the sort of nerd whinging set the tenor for what was to come. What’s particularly weird about it, in retrospect, is that Pratt’s performance in Illumination’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie is far from its worst asset. Sure, he’s not great, and he’s not Italian, but neither is Charles Martinet, the man behind the classic “It’s-a-me, a-Mario!” that you all know and love. Nor was Bob Hoskins. As far as appropriate representation, you’ve got to go all the way back to Captain Lou Albano on the Super Show.
No, the real problem lies in The Super Mario Bros. Movie’s very existence. It’s an 80-minute speed-run through Mario World, with little in the way of the fun that actually makes the video games themselves special, crammed full of generic fan service that will be lost on at least half of the viewers who haven’t immersed themselves in the games and the kind of Pixar-like feints at emotionally involving the audience. It has never really made sense to me, personally, why, in his screen adaptations, Mario has to come from our world: The games have never really had this problem and have outright accepted the absurdity of everyone in the ensemble getting together at the race track or golf course or tennis court in their off-hours. But, once again, we’re introduced to Mario (Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day), two Brooklyn plumbers who have struck it out on their own and started their own business, despite the ire of their former boss and the protests of their father. Hoping to generate press for their fledgling enterprise, the pair try to fix a broken water main and wind up in the depths of Brooklyn’s sewage system. It’s there that a green pipe sucks them into another dimension, and are subsequently separated.
Mario winds up in the Mushroom Kingdom, which is a bummer because he’s not a huge fan of fungi — and it’s because he doesn’t like the taste, not that he’s gone through a bunch of tough-actin’ Tinactin. Luigi has it much worse — he’s sent to the lava-filled lands ruled by Bowser (Jack Black), who looks to complete his conquest of the world by marrying the Kingdom’s princess, Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy). So, Mario needs to get his brother back, and with a little help from Toad (Keegan-Michael Key), a cook and explorer who is the first person that Mario encounters in this new dimension, he gets an audience with Peach. She agrees to help him, after a training montage, because she senses that he’s the key to saving her people from Bowser. Well, he and a whole bunch of Apes, that is. So the trio makes their way across the realms to try and convince Donkey Kong (Seth Rogen) and his dad, King Cranky Kong (Fred Armisen), to join up and battle Bowser.
The cast is fine, for the most part. Black is, perhaps, the standout, though his voice is buried under layers of modulation, and he gets some time to show off his pipes in a few original songs. But no one really gets to shine, given that the whole ensemble is limited by the levels of IP protection going on: for all of the changes and alterations that Nintendo was willing to make in trying to transform Mario into a traditional western-styled protagonist (this is, after all, a European studio adapting a Japanese video game about an Italian-American plumber, which makes it a strange melting plot of influences), they’re still ensuring that the enterprise remains on-brand, lest they repeat the ‘90s. Any interesting avenue is quickly curtailed by some reference to the games, be it Donkey Kong walking out to his rap when he and Mario have to compete in a physical competition (why not settle this like Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley and just head out to the links?) or some detail one can pick out in the background at a crowd scene. This may be satisfactory for a lot of eager fans, but for those who don’t give a shit, there’s not much beef here — it’s a strange how the movie moves so fast, cramming as much as it can into 80 minutes, and yet is so boring in practice.
As for the visuals, Illumination has settled for a weird mixture of fidelities: The house style is still present in anything not directly owned by Nintendo, with even a dog straight out of the Secret Life of Pets films coming to harass the brothers on a job in the real world. Once Brooklyn is left behind, the film really opens up. The design of the Mushroom Kingdom and its various realms full of talking toadstools, kart-driving apes, and aggrieved penguin-soldiers doesn’t really disappoint. Say what you will about Illumination’s base slapstick or hoary storytelling, but the company makes vivid and colorful pictures, with a level of thoughtful dedication applied to their textural world-building that mirrors Nintendo’s approach in a number of ways. Peach’s fiefdom is a bustling maze of shops and buildings all traversed by pipe, and what little of it we see — which is somewhat ironic given the fact that it was a centerpiece of the film’s marketing campaign from teaser poster on down — is amusing and lively in a way that the rest of it isn’t. That includes the action, which, aside from a few fun shots in which we hover behind Mario as he traverses the blocky levels in a uniquely cinematic way (compared to, say, the 3D games of the last 30 years), is just kind of flat and uninteresting with how specifically it apes the 2D platformers. This won’t be a problem for many — just think of how many people watch Mario Maker streams on Twitch — but it represents a missed opportunity to do something unique for a wholly different format.
Then again, that was the problem with the Bob Hoskins Mario Bros. that’s almost uniformly hated across the internet. ‘90s Hollywood attempted to apply the logic and aesthetic of the Tim Burton blockbuster to a property that was anything but a natural fit for that transformation. On the one hand, it’s easy to see why reverse-gene engineering plotlines and Raptor Yoshi and Dennis Hopper wilding out as King Koopa would irritate those with a real attachment to the Mario aesthetic and a love of the game’s simplicity: Smash koopas, jump high, save the princess. Yet it’s that tension between opposing styles that makes it fascinating even if it’s a “failure:” In a decade of weird Hollywood attempts to breach the nerd market, it is an exceptionally strange one. What Illumination has done here has replaced that odd visual sensibility with a style as close to the games as possible, but retained that sense of overcomplication. The games are aesthetic exercises with very little tangible narrative substance, meant to prioritize the gameplay experience and make it openly accessible to all willing to test their skills. Attempting to over-explain where Peach comes from and why she rules over a kingdom of Toads, or to try and offer a reason for Mario’s accent, or depicting the brothers’ struggles as small business owners in Brooklyn, misses the forest for the trees. No one — and I mean no one — really gives a good goddamn about any of that bullshit.
What’s so odd about this is that one would think Illumination — home of the unexplainable little yellow guys and the talking dogs — would simply be able to do what they are famous for in their original IPs in their adaptations. But, as is the case with their Seuss films, it seems like the studio panics when they have a sense that the works they are adapting are too thinly-written to extract a full feature’s worth of story from them. So they toss in your standard animated family film’s story about belonging and the power of friendship and try to answer dozens of questions that no one asked — some facetiously, some inexplicably seriously — as a way of insuring that they can stretch it out to the 80-minute mark. This is understandable for, say, The Grinch, but the joy of Mario games is that you don’t have to give a fuck about a three-act structure or, indeed, the reasoning behind any tangible detail in order to have fun. All you have to do is know that the cross-shaped thing moves the little guy, and pressing the A button makes him jump high. The rest will come to you.