Nintendo’s colourful characters, Mario and Luigi, are back for Level 2. In 2023, The Super Mario Bros Movie powered up in cinemas, grossing $1.361 billion and gaining three Oscar nods.
Created by Illumination, the animation company behind the Minions, this wild adventure plunged audiences into a 3D-realised world that was instantly familiar to anyone who has played any of the video games fronted by everyone’s favourite moustachioed, dungarees-wearing Brooklyn plumbers.
Returning us to the lurid, trippy Mushroom Kingdom, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is equally barmy, if not quite as fresh or funny as its predecessor. Loosely based on the 2007 game Super Mario Galaxy and its 2010 sequel, this new film introduces fan-favourite character Yoshi, the cuddly-ish green dinosaur – here voiced by Donald Glover – who has a rapacious appetite. Like in the game, he consumes things, even people, and turns them into eggs.
He soon meets with Mario (Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day), in an adventure that starts as Princess Rosalina (voiced by Brie Larson) is captured by a giant flying saucer, leaving her ‘babies’, the star-shaped, glowing Luma, at a loss for what to do.
Behind this abduction is the evil Bowser Jr (Benny Safdie) who is building a super weapon and needs her magic to power it. His father Bowser (Jack Black) remains shrunken to the size of a doll – all thanks to Mario’s actions at the end of the last movie.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a Mario movie without Princess Peach (Anna Taylor-Joy), the ruler of the Mushroom Kingdom, and Toad (Keegan-Michael Key), who become instrumental in mounting the mission to save Rosalina. As plots go, it’s standard fare, although Nintendo fans will surely get a kick out an appearance by Fox McCloud, the protagonist from the Star Fox series and here voiced by Glen Powell (even if the character looks a little too much like Nick Wilde, the foxy lead in Disney’s Zootopia).
Like its predecessor, the movie is at its best when it integrates classic Mario game-play styles into the narrative. There’s a lovely platform-like interlude where characters are ducking and diving through a security system built by Bowser Jr – who, amusingly, is controlling the boobytraps as if he’s playing a video game, with his monitor even displaying the action in rudimentary 8-bit graphics. There’s also a charming appearance by Honey Queen (Issa Rae), a regal character from the Mario-verse.
Unfortunately, there just aren’t enough of these moments. Co-directed by Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic, who return after helming the earlier Mario movie, the animation is vibrant, with each frame lovingly filled with detail. It’s just a shame the formulaic story feels about as paper-thin as you might expect from an adaptation of a ladders-and-levels video game. As is so common in these Hollywood animations, the ‘family is forever’ theme looms large, but never once feels sincere or authentic.
View Green Video on the source websiteFrom the voice cast, Benny Safdie (the recent director of The Smashing Machine and soon to be seen in Chris Nolan’s The Odyssey) has a blast as Bowser Jr, as does Glover as the lovable Yoshi, but there aren’t too many others who reach their level. Pratt, Day and Black all feel a little subdued, perhaps because the script by Matthew Fogel doesn’t exactly come armed with zingers.
While it’s likely that retro gamers won’t find anything here that wasn’t in the first movie – Yoshi and one or two others aside – it’s no doubt got enough for kids to enjoy, which will surely come as a relief for parents looking to entertain their offspring over the Easter holidays.
You never know – it might even convince them to put down their controllers, or their phones, for ninety-odd minutes.
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is released in UK cinemas on Wednesday 1 April.
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