The Super Mario Galaxy Movie might be the first film intentionally made so it can be divided into parts and uploaded to TikTok with the caption “prime mario aura farming [flame emoji]”. It certainly feels that way. If The Super Mario Bros Movie (2023) depersonalised the Nintendo games by casting a bored Chris Pratt as Mario the plumber and – mamma mia! – not asking him to even try the Italian accent, then The Super Mario Galaxy Movie doubles down on its own blandness.
There’s barely a plot here. Not a single memorable character. Not even another piano ditty for Jack Black to sing. It’s a series of large, vaguely connected explosions that Mario, his bro Luigi (Charlie Day), and his love interest Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) can land in front of in a superhero pose. Is it OK to ask why these sweet and goofy video game avatars are being treated as self-seriously as Marvel’s Avengers?
You really get a sense in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie of how homogenous our sense of nostalgia has become, to the point that a generation of kids are being robbed of art that encourages curiosity and imagination, in order for adults to be reassured that the passions of their lost childhoods were very cool and very important. There is… one real, solid joke in this film? And it’s mostly just repeating a bit from Disney’s Zootopia.
Instead, directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic – behind the Teen Titans Go! series, which is funny and original in all the ways this film is not – have done the work of referencing as many Mario or Nintendo games as possible (great news if you love Pikmin, I guess) and then called it a day.
Princess Rosalina (a charming and underutilised Brie Larson), a mother to the baby-star Lumas who can shoot glowing, five-pointed shuriken out of her wand, has been kidnapped by Bowser Jr (Uncut Gems co-director Benny Safdie) in order to power his Boomsday Machine so he can take revenge on Mario et al for having defeated and imprisoned his dad Bowser Snr (Jack Black). Yoshi (Donald Glover), who is sort of a dinosaur, is also there.
The Mario games have been willing to reinvent themselves again and again, to deliver the 2D cutouts of Paper Mario and then ship the poor guy off to compete in the Olympics (multiple times). But here, the film jettisons these characters into various universes – Honeyhive Galaxy and the Sand Kingdom – without much reason, as a clear reminder that there’s a world of difference between merely replicating something for the sake of familiarity and paying earnest, proper tribute. What could these films actually tell us about why Mario became so popular in the first place?
Peach, who doesn’t know where she comes from, yearns for some sense of family. For a scene or two, at most. Bowser tries his hand at being the good guy. For a scene or two, at most. The crew seek out the help of gung ho pilot Fox McCloud (Glen Powell), whose origins are introduced to us via retro, traditional animation. For a scene, at most. Then Fox, as a character, becomes nothing more than the bus driver getting these characters from point A to point B in the plot.
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie offers very little to audiences, young or old, who don’t already know these characters and spaces like the back of their hand. But, hey, if you take a tequila shot every time something explodes, you’ll have a great drinking game on your hands.
Dir: Aaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic. Starring: Chris Pratt, Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Day, Jack Black, Keegan-Michael Key, Benny Safdie, Donald Glover, Brie Larson. Cert PG, 98 minutes.
‘The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’ is in cinemas from 3 April
