The Super Mario Bros. Movie (Horvath, Jelenic, and Leduc, 2023)

If I were younger or less secure in my position as a film critic, I would probably spend more time trying to emphasize that I went into The Super Mario Bros. Movie with the so-called “open mind.” While the NES and Super NES platforms had their heyday while I was in graduate school, meaning that I don’t have the same fond memories of them that I do for the Atari 2600 or arcade versions of Donkey Kong, they still elicit deep nostalgia in me. I spent hours playing Dr. Mario on the Gameboy and I cherish the recollections of vacations I spent getting through Donkey Kong Country 2 and 3 and Mario Kart at my own brother’s home.

That openness lasted….ten minutes maybe? The Super Mario Bros. Movie doesn’t sink to the level of outright badness, but only because it never even tries to rise above the level of a ninety-minute commercial.

Criticisms, such as they are, probably begin and end with the story. Mario and Luigi live in either our world or a multiverse, animated version of it. Either way, they are magically transformed into the land of Toad, Princess, and Bowser, which has no backstory beyond that Bowser wants to marry Peach.

Mario and Luigi are affable losers, but losers nevertheless. They’ve just spent a bunch of money on a television commercial that nets them one plumbing job. They are to fix a leaky faucet. It is a pedestrian plumbing job at which they fail miserably, validating the criticism of their scoffers (including their family) that advertising their services was a colossal waste of money.

One might expect — I know I certainly did — that the purpose of making them put down and put upon in the real world is so that the magical world would be a welcome transformation, reminding kids of the escape value of video games where anyone who is not valued in the world around them can still be the hero. But when they get to Nintendoverse (or Toadland or Princessville or whatever it might be called), Luigi is immediately captured and Mario is shown to be equally incompetent in this world. Peach has an obstacle course that he has to complete to prove that he is worthy to accompany her, but after the obligatory montage (“even Rocky had a montage”), he still can’t do it. One might expect — I know I certainly did — that this failure would be the setup for a more satisfying success when the stakes are on the line, but no. Peach continues to channel her inner Lara Croft and Mario continues to channel his inner Scott Pilgrim….

A word too about Luigi’s capture. He’s banished to a hanging cage for most of the movie, making the film’s first and third-act messaging about brotherhood and teamwork being the key to success oddly pointless. I suspect the creative team feared that a traditional plumber rescuing the princess from a monster story might alienate a 21st-century audience, but the movie doesn’t so much deconstruct the sexist parts of the game and fairytale mythology as ignore them. And really, is a Beauty and the Beast reconstruction where a feisty princess agrees to marry so that an all-powerful dictator agrees not to kill her people really any more egalitarian?

Confusingly, the only one seeming to even try is Jack Black as Bowser. And while he does draw the occasional chuckle for channeling his School of Rock/High Fidelity charming doofus persona that makes the sexual predation at the heart of the storyline less sinister but no less gross. It’s hard to take him seriously as a threat, so maybe little kids won’t be scared. But absent any real menace, there are no stakes, and the heroes seem that much lamer for not being able to outwit or outfight a doofus.

I wasn’t expecting Pixar, but the heroes end where they started, not having been transformed by their experiences or learning anything from them. If the goal was to remind us how much fun some of these games were back in the day, mission accomplished, I guess. If the goal was to make us want to play them again or play their descendants on new platforms, the film is an epic failure.