From left to right: Yoshi (Donald Glover), Mario (Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day) in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie.Nintendo and Illumination/Supplied
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie
Directed by Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic
Written by Matthew Fogel
Featuring the voices of Chris Pratt, Charlie Day and Jack Black
Classification PG; 98 minutes
Opens in theatres April 1
Children, despite Hollywood’s best attempts to prove otherwise, are not stupid. Parents on the other hand, well…
How else to explain the massive success of 2023’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie, a thoroughly unimaginative and dreadful death-squeeze of Nintendo nostalgia that also became one of that year’s highest-grossing films, with a worldwide total of US$1.36-billion? Well, I suppose desperation also plays a part in things, and I’m certainly guilty on that front. Sometimes as a parent, you have to fill a few hours on the weekend; it’s too cold to go to the park; and movie theatres only play genuinely inventive, non-Pixar kiddie fare like The Lego Movie or Across the Spider-Verse once or twice a year if you’re lucky. (Hey, maybe those guys Phil Lord and Christopher Miller are onto something.)
All too often, it is either submitting to something like The Super Mario Bros. Movie, or forking over $150 to the fine folks at your local indoor playground.
And so all of us burned-out and lazy parents have collectively birthed The Super Mario Galaxy Movie into existence, an act so self-destructive that it feels like we accidentally summoned an interdimensional Lovecraftian monster into our world. But whereas a cosmic beast like Cthulhu or Azathoth at least possess all-knowing knowledge in addition to their sanity-breaking powers of terror, a horror like The Super Mario Galaxy Movie retains no vaguely redeeming qualities. A theoretically tidy but in fact endless 98 minutes of pure cinematic nothingness, the sequel is akin to staring directly into the endless, monstrous void – when you aren’t pulled back into reality by your kid asking you how much longer there is left until we can go home.
To summarize the film’s plot is an exercise in futility, but just know that the thin-by-way-of-Ozempic narrative involves those two mustachioed plumber siblings Mario and Luigi teaming up with a somewhat rehabilitated Bowser to take on a new villain, Bowser’s uppity tweenage son, who has concocted a plan to destroy the candy-coloured universe. Along the way, the cosmic priests of doom – I mean the movie’s directors and screenwriter, who shall not be named – introduce a rash of familiar video-game characters that will have anyone under the age of six briefly light up and, ideally, bring deep shame to anyone older should they let out an arrested-youth chortle.
Mario and Luigi in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie.Nintendo and Illumination/Supplied
I couldn’t begin to tell you what happens to all the various mushroom guys and cutesy dinosaurs and interchangeable princesses if you held a NES Zapper to my head. But rest assured that the story is as nonsensical as it is disposable, a cocktail-napkin of an idea brought to digital life with hundreds of millions of dollars of the emptiest-looking CG animation ever produced.
Does it matter to anyone, even the cast, that Donald Glover voices the ravenous Yoshi, who only says one word (“Yoshi”) in Groot-like fashion? That Chris Pratt and Charlie Day return as Mario and Luigi? That Jack Black, now king of the easy kiddie-flick payday, is back as Bowser? “Benny Safdie is Bowser Jr. and Brie Larson is Princess Rosalina” is a sentence that I did not invent, but one that makes me feel profoundly, existentially sad. (The only voice actor who comes out of this movie with his reputation relatively intact is Luis Guzman, who plays the frog villain Wart with the same breezy level of what-me-worry comedy that the actor brings to every project, including his many Steven Soderbergh collaborations.)
If you have not by now gone irrevocably insane and are still reading this review, then you might wonder why an adult’s opinion of a Mario movie even matters. I suppose that it doesn’t. So I will leave the last words with my six-year-old son, who thought it was “fun,” but was way more excited on the ride home to talk about the gummy bears that he mainlined, and his 11-year-old brother, who opted to attend soccer practice instead. Woo-hoo, that’s my boy.
Nintendo and Illumination/Supplied