Directed by: Aaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic
Starring: Chris Pratt, Jack Black, Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Day, Keegan-Michael Key
Rated PG, 92 minutes
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median age in America is just under 39. Which means that the Mario video game franchise, which began with “Mario Bros.” in 1983 (1981 if you count his appearance in “Donkey Kong” as the anonymous Jumpman), is older than more than half of all Americans alive today. In four decades, Nintendo has released more than 200 Mario games, between the central “Super Mario” series and its abundant spinoffs. It’s the best-selling video game franchise of all time, and by no small margin.
All this to say, “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” is the product of an endless font of source material, much of it beloved by fans who have been playing Mario games since childhood, many of whom now have children who are playing and forming their own attachments to the franchise. Naturally, the movie is stuffed with self-referential fan service: signs in the background alluding to game lore; creatures great and small from all corners of the extended Mario Bros. universe; musical themes drawn from across the franchise. In one throwaway gag, an antiques dealer tells a customer, “It works, you just have to blow on it,” a winking reference to Nintendo’s cartridge-based consoles, which, as any gamer of a certain age can tell you, often required you to blow on the cartridges to dislodge bits of dust.
That “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” is full of these in-jokes and shibboleths for fans of the games is no surprise. What is surprising is how the movie takes other, greater liberties with this most iconic of video game characters. While the games take place entirely within the colorful Mushroom Kingdom and other fantastical locales, “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” introduces us to Mario as a down-on-his-luck nobody living in Brooklyn, suddenly spirited away to a magical world of anthropomorphic toadstools and green pipes. We even meet Mario’s extended family, in dinner scenes that feel more like a slice-of-life comedy à la “Moonstruck” than they do a video game adaptation.
Matthew Fogel’s (“Minions: The Rise of Gru”) script makes further embellishments, offering origin stories for a franchise that hasn’t historically delved into its characters’ backgrounds. Most prominent in this regard is Princess Peach, a perennially dainty damsel in distress in the games, here given a backstory and depicted as a slick fighter possessed of an honorable sense of duty to her kingdom. Voiced by Anya Taylor-Joy (“Emma.”), Peach takes on a new self-assurance, a hard-earned wisdom about the ways of the world. Mario’s nemesis, the spiky-shelled King Bowser, is also updated for the big screen, his ploys to kidnap Peach tied to a motive of unrequited love (a subject occasionally hinted at but never stated so overtly in the games). In the role, Jack Black (“School of Rock”) gives an unexpectedly soulful performance, including an original song (“Peaches”), which has secured Black his first Top 100 hit.
Yet for all its creative liberties, “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” never loses sight of what makes Mario so popular. The action begins quickly and never lags; the colors are vivid and inviting, as is the music; the jokes, if not often laugh-out-loud funny, are always playful in spirit. And even though the movie adapts elements from dozens of games, it never feels disjointed or impenetrable. Children and adults who have never spent any time with Mario will be just as capable of appreciating its wide-eyed whimsy and its many cute character designs as will the diehards who spend the movie’s runtime looking for Easter eggs.
It isn’t a perfect movie—look no further than the lead role, voiced with underwhelming vigor by Chris Pratt (“Jurassic World”)—but it is a fitting spectacle for the biggest gaming behemoth that has ever existed, simultaneously full of appeals to viewer nostalgia and bold deviations from its source material. If part of Mario’s charm has always been that a mustachioed, potbellied plumber makes for an unlikely hero, then “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” with its $100 million budget and its A-list cast, boasts a different kind of charm, but a convincing charm nevertheless. “You just don’t know when to give up,” multiple characters tell Mario, driving home the movie’s simple moral code, which might be Nintendo’s credo, too: In a cynical world, it pays to stay earnest.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 4/28/23.