The Super Mario Bros. Movie is our latest discursive nightmare
I wa’d, I hoo’d, I yipee’d. I fist-pumped a Goomba. Nothing prepares you for this.
Sincerity is scary, I know. But I spent two hours smiling my way through The Super Mario Bros. Movie on Wednesday. I’m not like, Richard E Grant levels of delusional zeal about it, but I thought it was a lot of fun. Then I checked Twitter, and I realised that it’s never that simple.
From where I’m sitting, it seems like there are multiple factions at war here. There’s the ‘it’s for kids’ crowd who are, ironically, mostly middle-aged fans who grew up with Mario. They’re pissed off because they want to enjoy their popcorn movie, but from their perspective, the critics have put out a hit on it because of *spins wheel* their hatred of Chris Pratt, or they just don’t get it, or something. But they don’t really hold anything to a high standard as long as it achieves what it has set out to do. So by that metric, The Super Mario Bros. Movie wins by doing absolutely nothing. The inevitable record-breaking numbers will be their shield.
They are defensive about this movie because to them, this is their beloved product’s chance to finally hit the big time. People used to get bullied for being into these games when they were kids, but here we are in 2023, and Mario is a blockbuster movie star. Leave him alone! What boggles my mind about this position is the assumption that the Mario franchise is some plucky underdog that needs critical acclaim. Dude literally has theme parks now… and it’s a fun family movie, he’ll be fine!
Alas, this is par for the course for any video game adaptation. They are routinely let off the hook because the games industry is still in some kind of weird thrall to The Movies, even though games are now palpable cultural behemoths. It’s our cool older brother that we’re embarrassingly desperate to impress, which is why we wheel out actors at award shows, and make a big fuss when someone famous says they’ve played a game that sold millions of copies. It’s a weird legitimacy complex that deserves its own newsletter.
On the other side of the fence we have the critics, who are just doing their job. I don’t agree with some of the more harsh scores I’ve seen, or the notion that the movie is a vacuous fan-service advert with phoned-in performances and bad CGI. But, a lack of consensus is a healthy thing, and not an affront to my enjoyment. There is plenty of great criticism of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, and I’m reading all of it.
Of course, there’s also a bunch of irony-poisoned haters who have lost the capacity to open their hearts to a children’s movie, and see its focus-tested safety as some kind of gross monument to greed. They probably won’t see it, or perhaps see it ironically, but they’ll make everyone aware that they should feel bad for enjoying it because it’s not Suspiria. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some avant-garde cinema, but I also want some McDonald’s every now and then. If I just watched movies like Inland Empire and Stalker all the time, I’d probably have a (harder) time getting up in the morning.
A clip of the late, great Roger Ebert has been doing the rounds where he talks about how people are more happy to see mediocre films than good ones. I’m sure people will wilfully misinterpret it to bolster their elitism, but I think that would be an ignorant reading of it. The quote he ends it on stuck out to me as a mantra for this sort of thing.
“The job of the critic I think is to be a little better moviegoer, to say there’s nothing wrong with a disaster movie, but wait for a good one, you can’t see them all” - Roger Ebert
The way I see it, as long as you’re not punching down at the audience, then fire away. The only people who really need to care about the disparity between the critic score and the audience score are the people who bankrolled the movie.
If you’re still on the fence, Mario’s big-screen bash is not unexpectedly profound like Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, and it’s certainly not as stylistically groundbreaking as Into the Spider-verse. In the pantheon of modern animation, I’d say it’s about on par with Jeff Fowler’s Sonic the Hedgehog films, but it ducks the uncanny character subversion. Illumination plays it straight but still keeps it silly. I’m sure they were on a pretty short leash from Nintendo in that regard, whereas SEGA could afford to do some mad shit (see below), given the inconsistent reputation of their long-suffering mascot.
The reliable fish out of water tale is flipped the opposite way around. Mario and Luigi have left their stable tradie jobs to run a struggling plumbing startup in real-life Brooklyn. As a result, they are the laughing stock of the family, who chide them for their silly outfits and quirky marketing. But a New York waterworks disaster provides them with an opportunity to prove themselves. Unfortunately, they end up stumbling into a subterranean dungeon and are sucked into its Warp Pipes, which separate the duo across the Mushroom Kingdom. This narrative runs in tandem with Bowser’s nefarious plan to forcefully marry Princess Peach and conquer the place.
Like most people who were 15 in 2010, I have seen Despicable Me. But I haven’t caught anything from Illumination since then. I’m not popping off for the Minion squad, as Conner O’Malley would put it. I had few expectations, then, but I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it, none-the-less. Before I dig into my own thoughts, it’s probably worth noting that I saw this movie in 4DX 3D, so I was being chucked about like an empty tracksuit when Donkey Kong was happy-slapping Mario. It certainly added to the charm.
First off, it looks about as good as I could have hoped without being too derivative of the art style of the 3D games (I’m glad we didn’t open the Pandora’s Box of trying to render a live-action Mario).
And yeah, there’s a Mario Kart bit and some platforming segments, but they make sense within the story and feel like baseline hallmarks of the IP rather than sales pitches. Jack Black’s Bowser is an angry creep who is secretly insecure, which feels bang-on based on my knowledge of the character. They even chuck in a duo of (delightful) musical numbers for him, which feels like an essential part of the deal if you’ve got the lead singer of Tenacious D as your villain.
You don’t see enough of him, but Charlie Day’s bumbling little brother schtick is convincing, and I liked the agency they gave Anya Taylor-Joys’s Peach. But it’s the smaller characters that summoned the most laughs for me. Particularly Kevin Michael Richardson’s Kamek, a Wormtongue-esque lackey with a hilarious affectation.
The most offensive thing about this movie is that they don’t credit Grant Kirkhope, even though they use the DK Rap. They also make a thing of Mario not liking mushrooms, which I thought was needlessly dumb. And I could have done without the several stings of ill-fitting 80s music that seem to plague blockbusters nowadays. That felt like a slap in the face, especially because they had Koji Kondo on composer duties (who does a banging job, btw — certain themes got me in my feelings).
There’s a scene at the start of the movie, in real-world Brooklyn, where Mario and Luigi fuck up a plumbing job for a posh couple with a mean-ass dog. I’m a hard marker, but I laughed my ass off at the slapstick, and when it was done, I felt like there was definitely scope for a weirder, funnier sequel (a la Sonic the Hedgehog 2) now that the groundwork has been lain. If anything, it’d be interesting to see how esoteric they can get with the references, as there was some pretty niche stuff in there, like the Famicom mascot ‘Disk-Kun’ and the GameCube startup sound.
Basically, If you go in with a big sodie pop and your arms unfolded, you’re going to have a good time. If you’re going with your kids this weekend, have a blast, they’re probably going to love it. But if you have divorced yourself from your inner child, or have some sort of immovable canon in your head, don’t bother. It’s a fun movie, even if it casts a very wide net. And we could all do with being a bit less weird about it.
Here’s Charles Martinet with the closing L + Ratio. See you next week. Or sooner, probably, it just sounds cool to say that.
The Rec Room
Read: Diego Nicolás Argüello on the updated Spanish of Resident Evil 4 Remake.
Listen: R.I.P Ryuichi Sakamoto.
Watch: Merritt K’s video essay on the psychology of live-service games