In 1993, the live-action adaptation of Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros was so hideously chaotic that it led the games giant to largely shun the film industry until 2019’s Detective Pikachu. Instead of a moustachioed, hyperactive Italian plumber hopping across platforms and down pipes, we were presented with a depressive Bob Hoskins trapped in what looked like the rotting set of a Broadway musical production of Blade Runner. At least you couldn’t call it predictable, though. The Super Mario Bros Movie, an animated rendition of the game courtesy of Illumination (aka the Minion people), is nothing more and nothing less than what you’d expect from a Mario film.
Its comfortable mediocrity is no better captured than in its choice to cast Chris Pratt – the current face of generic, easy-to-market heroism – in the starring role. Pratt, it should be said, is perfectly capable of the sort of outsized performance Mario needed, having previously turned in himbos of equal, puppyish élan in The Lego Movie and Guardians of the Galaxy. But the Pratt called upon here is of the blandly sincere, hire-a-hero variety, delivering lines like “let’s-a-go!” and “mamma mia!” with all the vigour of a contractual obligation and not a trace of Italian.
