The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) exists for one primary reason: $967 million at the worldwide box office. That falls short of the $1.36 billion earned by 2023’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie, but in the long run, what’s a few hundred million bucks? Chump change for gigantic studio conglomerates, that’s what. The first entry in the obviously highly lucrative franchise barely hung together as a movie, dropping references from the broad spate of video games inspiring it; the second is more of the same – and bringing back key voice talent like Chris Pratt, Anya Taylor-Joy and Jack Black – but even more so, and more loosely plotted. So loosely, it’s even less of a “real movie” than its predecessor.
The Gist: Before we Get Into It, please allow me to divulge that watching The Super Mario Bros. Movie, some nominal time spent with classic Mario games from the 1980s and many hours of playing Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros. with my kid does not make me enough of a fan of this franchise to comprehend this new movie’s ratatat-assault of characters, locations, references and easter eggs it’s passing off as a plot. Good news is, you can spend a few more hundos on all the old games so you can catch up. Bad news is, there’s not much to amuse us know-diddly-squatters, e.g., a comprehensible story, a focus on the guy in the title or Jack Black singing a ridiculous song, three things that made the first movie a tolerable experience for a broader range of movie watchers. So let it be known, if portions of this review include phrases like “weird Mexican space town” or “infantile sentient star-shaped blobs who call a human woman ‘mama’,” it is purely in the spirit of the movie’s extraordinarily lazy screenplay, which is a rocky place where no seed of inclusivity can find purchase.
Anyway. We open in outer space somewhere. Princess Rosalina (Brie Larson) lives in a castle with many infantile sentient star-shaped blobs who call her “mama”’ – but not for long, because she’s kidnapped by evil guy Bowser Jr. (Benny Safdie), son of large turtle monster Bowser (Black), the classic Mario adversary. Jr. wants to use her as leverage to free his pops from Mario (Chris Pratt), Luigi (Charlie Day) and Princess Peach (Taylor-Joy), who shrunk the beast down to action-figure proportions and sorta imprisoned him (he lives in a little castle and spends his time painting, so a maximum-security prison it ain’t) after his diabolical shenanigans in the first movie. Jr. also voices his desire to destroy the universe, for reasons that escape me; if he is part of said universe, would he not be destroying himself via those actions, and what’s the point of rescuing his dad if they’re just going to turn around and render all of reality a smoking crater? Which is to say, Bowser Jr. might just be a gol’ danged idjit.
We catch up with Mario and Luigi as they race across a desert on cool motorbikes, which, like far too many things in this movie, is a scenario almost certainly culled from a Mario game I haven’t played. They venture to a weird Mexican space town and befriend cute lil dinosaur guy Yoshi (Donald Glover), who’s gifted with the ability of swallowing other characters whole and shitting them out, trapped inside large speckled eggs. This new trio of pals reunites with Princess Peach (Taylor-Joy) and her right hand dude Toad (Keegan-Michael Key) on a quest to rescue Rosalina, her sister.
Off they go, and so goes the plot. The rest of the film involves various journeys/encounters with myriad characters and places from the Super Mario Galaxy game, and from other properties in the (and I’m cringing typing this word) Nintendoverse. Shall I list some of those characters? I mean, that’s essentially what the movie does, and I’m obligated to mention a name like Glen Powell, who voices a starfighter pilot named Fox McCloud, because he’s a big star. We also have Issa Rae as the Honey Queen, Luis Guzman as Wart and Kevin Michael Richardson as Kamek. These are not significant characters, but they’ll gobble up screen time so we can spend less quality time with Mario and Peach because, you know, who cares about THE MARQUEE NAMES AROUND HERE. There’s also a funny robot named ROB. All these things crash together in a big heap and it’s passed off as a movie. Congrats on the billion dollars, giant conglomerate movie studio!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Chalk up Mario Galaxy Movie alongside fellow video-game adaptations A Minecraft Movie and the two Five Nights at Freddy’s films as for-fans-only fodder that will leave casual viewers bored and snoozing in their dust.
Performance Worth Watching Hearing: Not much emerges from this blur of unmemorable action and Too Many Characters, although Key does generate a smidgen of humor as the put-upon Toad, who sees his sidekick role diminished with the introduction of Yoshi.
Sex And Skin: None.
Our Take: Man, I know this is kiddie stuff, and it’s almost certainly conceived and executed to mirror the platform-jumping/beat-the-level/toss-the-boss structure of video games, but throw us casual watchers a bone, please – an emotional hook, some dramatic tension or rising action, a worthy gag, anything. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is remarkably empty on every level beyond its occasional bit of eye candy, or a nominal commitment to visual storytelling over the typical non-stop verbal jibberjabber of lower-tier animated fodder. And even then, the word “storytelling” implies that there’s a story to tell here, when there really isn’t: A bunch of characters try to rescue the princess, or prevent the rescue. Meanwhile, some subplots are introduced – a nascent romance between Peach and Mario, the goofy dynamic between the two Bowsers stemming from the elder’s uncertainty if he’s still evil or been rehabilitated – and unceremoniously brushed away, their potential for drama and/or comedy tragically left untapped.
My lack of enthusiasm for this movie grows with every passing word of this review. Younger audiences and diehard Mario heads will likely deem it acceptable, more so if they keep a running tally of the references they recognize in a game of Gotta Catch ’Em All. I sound cynical, but remember, I didn’t draw this lukewarm bath, I’m just forced to sit in it for 98 minutes, trying to gauge whether fans will find the T-rex, the frog guy, that one goofy shadow character dude, some penguins, the Bowser planet, etc., as proper reward for their years of franchise loyalty. That’s a game too, an even dumber one than collecting references like trading cards or figurines. And all this adds up to one undeniable truth: The Super Mario Galaxy Movie isn’t really a movie. It’s a means of padding corporate shareholder stakes. What fun!
Our Call: Super Mari-NO. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.