The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023) poster

The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023)

Rating:


USA/Japan. 2023.

Crew

Directors – Aaron Horvath & Michael Jelenic, Co-Directors – Pierre Leduc & Fabien Polack, Screenplay – Matthew Fogel, Based on the Videogame Created by Shigeru Miyamoto, Producers – Chris Meledandri & Shigeru Miyamoto, Music – Brian Tyler, Original Nintendo Themes – Koji Kondo, Animation Directors – Christophe DeLisle & Ludovic Roz, CGI Supervisors – Mathieu Le Meur & David Pelle, Production Design – Guillaume Aretos. Production Company – Nintendo/Universal/Illumination.

Voices

Chris Pratt (Mario Mario), Anya Taylor-Joy (Princess Peach), Charlie Day (Luigi Mario), Jack Black (Bowser), Seth Rogen (Dinky Kong), Kevin Michael Richardson (Kamek), Keegan Michael-Key (Toad), Fred Armisen (Cranky Kong), Khary Payton (Penguin King), Chris Martinet (Mario’s Dad/Giuseppe), Sebastian Maniscalco (Spike), Jessica DiCicco (Mario’s Mom)


Plot

In Brooklyn, brothers Mario and Luigi has launched their own plumbing business, calling themselves The Super Mario Brothers. They have placed all their finances into creating a commercial but this has so far been without success. They see their opportunity with a water main explosion downtown. Venturing into the sewers to cap the pipes, they come across a strange portal. Luigi is sucked inside and Mario dives in after. Mario ends up in the kingdom of the Mushroom People where he is taken to see their ruler, the human Princess Peach. They are under threat from Bowser, king of the Goombas, who is conquering his way across all the other kingdoms in his determination to marry Peach. Luigi has meanwhile landed in the Dark Lands and is captured and taken to Bowser who makes him a prisoner, seeing Mario as a rival for Peach’s affections. Peach decides the only way to stop Bowser is to travel to the Jungle Kingdom and gain the aid of Donkey Kong and the Kong army.


Super Mario Bros. (1983) was a videogame created by Nintendo that has gone onto become one of the top-selling games of all time, having sold some 380 million copies to date. The original game only had 32kb of memory – less than one of the pictures that illustrates this page. The game popularised 2d side-scrolling action where the characters ran along and up and down the screen, hopping between various obstacles and nemeses. The film’s nominal plot follows the two plumber characters as they fight off various characters in their effort to rescue the princess. There have been some two dozen follow-ups and spinoffs as every different game type out there, everything including adventure scenarios to racing and sports (Mario Tennis and Mario Golf).

The game was previously adapted to the screen as the live-action Super Mario Bros. (1993), starring Bob Hoskins as Mario, John Leguizamo as Luigi and Dennis Hopper as King Koopa (the equivalent of Bowser). This was the first ever Film Based on a Videogame and was such a critical and audience flop that it nearly killed the nascent videogame-to-film genre off before it even started, not to mention never had its two directors ever employed again.

The animation company Illumination Entertainment made a big splash with their first film Despicable Me (2010), which proved an unexpected delight with audiences, while the small supporting characters of the Minions went on to take over popular culture. Thereafter Illumination seemed stuck in repeating the same success and churned out Despicable Me 2 (2013), Minions (2015), Despicable Me 3 (2017) and Minions: The Rise of Gru (2022), along with two Dr Seuss adaptations The Lorax (2012) and The Grinch (2018), plus an unhappy venture into live-action with the Easter Bunny film Hop (2011). More recently, they bounced back with two appealing original works The Secret Life of Pets (2016) and Sing (2016), both of which spawned sequels with The Secret Life of Pets 2 (2019) and Sing 2 (2021).

Brothers Mario (Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day) in The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023)
The Super Mario Brothers – (l to r) Mario (Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day)

The surprise is that The Super Mario Bros. Movie has ended up becoming the most financially successful of all videogame adapted films – earning $1.2 billion at current count, three times as much at the box-office than the previous holders of that title, Warcraft (2016). The original 1993 film incidentally ranks at the very bottom of the Wikipedia list. The Super Mario Bros. Movie has also ended up being one of the few videogame adaptations that has received good reviews from the press and public alike.

The film keeps fairly much to the nature of the original games. It is constantly finding ways to create multi-level (sometimes two-dimensional) mazes for the characters to run through – there is even one that turns up on a building site that the brothers have to pass through on their way to the water main explosion. The journeys through the Mushroom Kingdom and the fight with Donkey Kong have labyrinths of pipes, ladders and mid-air floating platforms that they are constantly having to jump between and slide down – even the princess’s initiation of Mario requires him to successfully complete one of these.

Elsewhere, the film is constantly winding in elements of gameplay – the Super Star, the constant ?s and the mushroom power ups that allow people to grow in size (as well as shrink in size, a variation that was introduced in later games). There is also an opportunity for the characters to engage in a go-kart race, winding in aspects from Super Mario Kart (1992), which has spun off some ten games of its own in which the Mario characters go go-kart racing. There is also an appearance from Donkey Kong – Mario’s original appearance was as Jumpman, a carpenter who appeared in the first Donkey Kong game in 1981, and the two have regularly crossed over since then. I was surprised that much of the action sidelines Luigi and the film’s story focuses on Mario but this is apparently part of the games where the only or main playable character in many of the earlier iterations was Mario.

Donkey Kong (Seth Rogen), Mario (Chris Pratt), Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) and Cranky Kong (Fred Armisen) go go-kart racing in The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023)
(l to r) Donkey Kong (Seth Rogen), Mario (Chris Pratt), Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) and Cranky Kong (Fred Armisen) go go-kart racing

It all takes place in a giddy blur of primary and pastel colours – sometimes even vivid rainbows as with the go-kart race – that is the visual equivalent of eating a good deal of candy, while there is nothing that engages the brain above the level of a five-year old. If there is one thing that could be said in favour of the 1993 film is that it valiantly tried to rationalise everything in terms of a science-fictional scenario that involved alternate timelines where dinosaurs had not died out, even if all that ended up being was the replacement by most of the game’s non-human characters with regular human actors. On the other hand here, we have a scenario that exists purely in the realm of fantasy where you search for any kind of underlying rationale that explains things – a world where there are mushroom people, talking apes, a lizard dark lord who sings and plays piano, and where characters engage in go-kart races along rainbow tracks in mid-air. Like things in the game, it just is, you don’t ask any questions about it.

Co-directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic come from work on the animated tv series Teen Titans Go! (2013– ), while Horvath co-directed the series’ first film spinoff Teen Titans Go! To the Movies (2018), which he also wrote with Jelenic. Here they recruit some of the voice talent from Teen Titans Go!, including Scott Menville and Khary Payton.

Other films adapted from videogames include Super Mario Bros. (1993), Double Dragon (1994), Street Fighter (1994), Mortal Kombat (1995), Wing Commander (1999), Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001), Lara Croft, Tomb Raider (2001), Resident Evil (2002), House of the Dead (2003), Alone in the Dark (2005), BloodRayne (2005), Doom (2005), DOA: Dead or Alive (2006), Silent Hill (2006), Hitman (2007), In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (2007), Postal (2007), Far Cry (2008), Max Payne (2008), Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010), Tekken (2010), Dead Rising: Watchtower (2015), Angry Birds (2016), Assassin’s Creed (2016), Warcraft (2016), Rampage (2018), Pokemon Detective Pikachu (2019), Monster Hunter (2020), Sonic the Hedgehog (2020), Werewolves Within (2021), the tv series Halo (2022- ), Uncharted (2022), Five Nights at Freddy’s (2023), Gran Turismo (2023) and the tv series The Last of Us (2023- ).


Trailer here


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