Movie Review: The Super Mario Bros. Movie

April 7, 2023

by Greg Uke, Reporter

Let me begin this review by saying that the 80’s was a pretty weird time.

They didn’t seem weird back then because I was just a kid, and whatever you experience at that age gets normalized. Only now, as an adult with offspring of my own, can I look back at shows like Stranger Things and think “oh no, I AM one of those kids” or “I HAD that haircut once” or “yep, that’s what being a Dungeons & Dragons nerd was like before COVID made it cool.”

The same is true for the first console games. Sitting on the 80’s-carpeted floor of my family home, surrounded by 80’s-tastic furniture and 80’s-tastic wallpaper, I once unboxed a little Nintendo cartridge on Saturday morning (back when there were still Saturday morning cartoons) and played Super Mario for the first time. There was no Luigi. No Toad. No Yoshi or Wario. Just a zippy little 8-bit man who could jump twenty times his height. Mario and I stomped our way through a marathon of pipes, goombas, turtles, man-eating flowers, and floating platforms. We ate magic mushrooms and flowers to fight fire breathing turtles who captured princesses and kept moving them between castles to prevent rescue (which made Bowser a tactical genius in the eyes of a 6 year old).

But let’s be honest; the guys who invented these games were doing some hardcore drugs back in the 60’s. All the signs are there. Magic mushrooms, jumping down pipes, little east coast New-York-Italian plumbers in overalls. The Bubble Bobble dragons. A gorilla named Donkey Kong. It’s there. But I grew up with The Super Mario Bros. So for me, and millions like me, it carries a deep and fond nostalgia.

So let’s talk about the movie, starting with the good.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie was very well made. It incorporates equal amounts of humor and action, while faithfully depicting all the crazy drug-fueled details the IP has developed down the years in a way that doesn’t come across as jarring or lame. And with cat and tanooki suits in the mix, that can be tough. They pull this off by being over the top and not trying to rationalize anything, which I believe was the right way to go. The Mushroom Kingdom was bright and syrupy and candy-like. The floating citadel of Bowser was dark and ominous, oozing smoke and dust. The weird little creatures from the video games were depicted either as “wildlife” or as characters with their own personalities, even the turtle troopers. And they didn’t stint on the raw power of Bowser. Every time he breathed fire I thought “oh wow”.

But as with all animated films, the personalities were what did it for me. The best voice-acted character in the movie, in my humble opinion, was Bowser. A good villain does a lot for a movie, and Jack Black’s (School of Rock) depiction of a dragon unapologetically crushing on a tomboy princess is HILARIOUS. Most villains would make some attempt to conceal this as their ultimate motive (because it’s embarrassing and unseemly), but Jack revels in his role. The hurricane-like force behind Bowser’s petty romantic jealousy is so pure.

Chris Pratt (Guardians of the Galaxy) voices Mario while Charlie Day (The Lego Movie) voices Luigi….and you can tell by the banter between them that they’re both friends in real life. Anya Taylor (Queen’s Gambit) does a terrific job as Princess Peach, mainly because of her tongue-in-cheek delivery. The Kong Kingdom deserves an honorable mention because Fred Armisen’s (Wednesday) depiction of Cranky Kong reminds me of King Louie from the Jungle Book, and Seth Rogan’s (This is The End) Donkey Kong is amusingly narcissistic. When it comes to roleplaying DK you either have to go 100% that way or depict him as a stupid caveman. There is no in between.

The movie is also great because it makes a nod to most of the Mario games that have come out since the IP’s inception. I saw elements of the first few Nintendo games right away, but then they delved into Mario Kart and Super Smash Brothers with enough grace that it didn’t seem forced. When the heroes were building their race cars I squeed, and that’s a good thing. They even threw in a demolition derby. This was my favorite action sequence because they added rollercoaster-like visuals directly from the game…the ones that make people nauseous.

That being said, I did have one major criticism to make.

In this day and age, social justice is vital. The only way to achieve tolerance and equality is to indoctrinate children in these values from a young age. Detractors of this idea claim that modern shows are too woke. That the growing equalization of minorities and flexibility of gender identities is damaging to society, and persecuting people for refusing to adhere to norms is okay as long as they aren’t the ones being persecuted. I do not share any of these evil sentiments.

But that door swings both ways. It is not socially just to raise up one slice of society by humiliating, emasculating, or infantilizing another. This is “bully think”, and it smacks of high school. All it does is make people feel attacked, and when people feel attacked they react negatively. Where am I going with all this? In the beloved video games I spent hundreds of hours playing as a child, Mario and Luigi were always heroes. I looked up to them.

Unfortunately, in this movie, The Super Mario Bros. are treated as total losers without a redemption arc.

Mario spends 50-60% of his screen time being overshadowed or getting his ass handed to him. Luigi spends 90% of the movie in jail, trembling and fearing for his life. They are introduced as failures in business. Their own family ridicules them. They botch their first job. At no point does either character become competent. When they do prevail against adversity it is because they get power-ups of some sort. Even when Mario demonstrates grit and determination, the movie is quick to remind viewers that he is still an incompetent wuss who catches a few lucky breaks.

Meanwhile, Princess Peach is the true hero. She is brave, strong, skillful, and demonstrates intelligence and leadership. She towers over Mario figuratively and literally. The movie also goes out of its way to inform viewers that her power is NOT the consequence of hard work or training; she is just naturally that way. This is reinforced when she dumps him into a deadly obstacle course. We get to watch a montage of Mario being brutalized for hours in a test he NEVER manages to pass before the writers thoughtfully add that Peach was able to do the entire thing without a scratch the first time she tried.

I understand why they did this: Princess Peach has historically been portrayed as a damsel in distress, and they wanted to show her as a strong self-possessed character. I absolutely love strong, intelligent women, but they didn’t have to constantly humiliate Mario and Luigi to build her up, and it certainly shouldn’t have been the dominant theme of the entire movie (which, sadly, it was).

Overall

The Super Mario Bros. Movie was witty, exciting, and fun. In its attempt to be funny, it sadly attacked the memory of the two characters the movie was named after. These were characters from my childhood, characters I loved, and it hurt me to see them treated in this fashion. Peach was perfectly capable of being awesome without destroying their respective characterization for the entirety of the film.

Rating:
ComicsOnline gives The Super Mario Bros. Movie 3.5 out of 5 stars.