{"id":576988,"date":"2026-03-31T20:20:12","date_gmt":"2026-03-31T20:20:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/576988\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T20:20:12","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T20:20:12","slug":"the-super-mario-galaxy-movie-review-frenetic-and-disappointing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/576988\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’ Review: Frenetic and Disappointing"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIn \u201cThe Super Mario Galaxy Movie<\/a>,\u201d we meet Yoshi, a cuddly green dinosaur in pink boots who looks like a plastic bath toy and will eat just about anything (he\u2019s voiced in a babyish coo by Donald Glover). We also meet an army of Lumas, the icky-adorable iridescent stars in designer colors who are the cousins of Lumalee from \u201cThe Super Mario Bros. Movie\u201d \u2014 but Lumalee had a funny Debbie Downer vibe, whereas the new ones are just generic glowstick mascots saying \u201cMama!\u201d The mama they\u2019re referring to is Princess Rosalina (Brie Larson), the adoptive mother of the Lumas (how did that happen? Why ask why?), who happens to be the sister of Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy). In the opening scene, Rosalina is kidnapped by a giant shape-shifting droid that whisks her to outer space, where the entire movie takes place \u2014 and I mean that it really is set in space, since it never settles on a planet, or anywhere else, long enough to give you a satisfying sense of locale.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat droid is being controlled by Bowser Jr., who is like a tiny plushie version of his father \u2014 and who, as voiced by Benny Safdie, comes off as a kiddie Wallace Shawn pipsqueak tyrant. He\u2019s got daddy issues, of course, but will resolve them, since Bowser (Jack Black<\/a>) hasn\u2019t gone away. He\u2019s just very small (that happened when he got zapped at the end of the first film), and he\u2019s now rather chastened, to the point that he actually becomes a friend of our heroes for a while and\u00a0never even sings one song\u00a0(that\u2019s right \u2014 there is no sequel to \u201cPeaches\u201d in this movie). Then Bowser gets big again and reunites with his son, and the two agree to rule the universe together (or something), but somehow two Bowsers add up to less of a wowser than one.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tI should mention that the film also includes the grouchy Toad (Keegan-Michael Key) and his fellow denizens of the Mushroom Kingdom, plus the Honey Queen (Issa Rae), who rules the Honeyhive galaxy, and Wart (Luis Guzm\u00e1n), who might just as well be called the Frog King, as well as the artesan\u00eda-decorated residents of what appears to be a Mexican village in the red desert, plus a giant bee, Rob the Robot (who has a funny moment when he gets stuck on saying the letter \u201crrrrrrrrr\u2026.\u201d), a full-on T. rex and a giant purple dragon, plus Fox McCloud (Glen Powell), a swaggering pilot who\u2019s like Han Solo crossed with Rocket from the \u201cGuardians of the Galaxy\u201d films.<\/p>\n

\n\tDid I mention that Mario (Chris Pratt<\/a>) and Luigi (Charlie Day), those valiant mustached Brooklyn plumbers, are in \u201cThe Super Mario Galaxy Movie\u201d? They most definitely are, though they often feel like an afterthought. They\u2019re on their own disparate galaxy quest, trying to stop the Bowsers, and to help Princess Peach rescue her captive sister. She and Mario have a mutual crush thing going on, but that\u2019s kind of an afterthought too, since the romance isn\u2019t built into the movie\u2019s storyline. Nothing is, really. Not a single one of these characters, including Mario and Luigi, occupies the center of \u201cThe Super Mario Galaxy Movie.\u201d And that\u2019s because the movie has no center.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe film keeps throwing things at you. It\u2019s an orgy of video-game Easter eggs, but while that\u2019s all clearly designed to appeal to young gamers, I don\u2019t mean that the film replicates the experience of playing one of the Super Mario Bros. games. The first movie actually did \u2014 and managed, at the same time, to be a miraculously entertaining transmutational story for kids and adults alike. It was one of the best animated films in years.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe Super Mario Galaxy Movie\u201d is one of the worst. It has the same directors, Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic, and the same screenwriter, Matthew Fogel, but despite flashes of imagistic dazzle, it almost seems like these talented artists have been body-snatched. It feels like the Nintendo suits took over this time. \u201cThe Super Mario Galaxy Movie\u201d is full of scenes of running, leaping, chasing, falling through the air, falling into lava, fighting and more fighting, but nothing in the movie is sustained. It\u2019s a mad jumble, an eager product-tie-in mess. It\u2019s one of the only animated features I\u2019ve seen since the \u201cPok\u00e9mon\u201d films that seems to be wearing its Easter eggs on the outside.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe Super Mario Bros. Movie\u201d had a center, and a great one, in the presence of Bowser, who Jack Black played as a leering supervillain who was also a debauched romantic. The entire plot of the movie spun out of his love for Princess Peach, and Black\u2019s vocal performance was a delectable weave of monomania and insecurity. I realize that the filmmakers didn\u2019t just want to repeat what they did the first time. But they should have gone bigger. And the fact that Black never gets to sing a song is going to disappoint a galaxy\u2019s worth of fans. Instead, the two Bowsers wind up seeming rather innocuous: just another double cog in the film\u2019s machinery of eye candy in all directions.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe Super Mario Galaxy Movie\u201d is frenetic in such an impersonal way that it feels like the entire film should be put on Ritalin. Yet it may well be that as a commercial enterprise, this more-is-more Easter-egg hunt of a movie will clean up exactly as it\u2019s designed to. The film treats its story as a threadbare adventure, a mere throwaway, because it\u2019s so focused on those little pings of recognition for gamers. And that\u2019s quite a comedown. After several decades of dreadful video-game films, \u201cThe Super Mario Bros. Movie\u201d and, last year, \u201cA Minecraft Movie\u201d were proof positive that the big-screen adaptation of a game could be wild \u2014 and, in a phantasmagorical way, classical \u2014 fun. Let\u2019s hope \u201cThe Super Mario Galaxy Movie\u201d doesn\u2019t herald a return to the days of video-game movies as spectacular and overstimulated chaos.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In \u201cThe Super Mario Galaxy Movie,\u201d we meet Yoshi, a cuddly green dinosaur in pink boots who looks…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":576989,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,15295,134,45335,344,160201],"class_list":{"0":"post-576988","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-chris-pratt","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-jack-black","13":"tag-movies","14":"tag-the-super-mario-galaxy-movie"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=576988"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576988\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/576989"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=576988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=576988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=576988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}