Plumb new lows
Back in 1993, Bob Hoskins appeared in what he would go on to call the worst film of his career. Constant rewrites and bitter arguments between distributors, directors and producers left Super Mario Bros a chaotic mess that bore little resemblance to the game that inspired it.
It’s taken Nintendo 30 years to allow anyone to bring their coin-collecting siblings back to the big screen. And this new movie could be even worse.
Weirdly, the slickly animated film opens in a similar way, with Mario (voiced by Chris Pratt) and his nervous brother Luigi (Charlie Day) working as plumbers in modern-day Brooklyn.
There’s a promising early slapstick sequence where they try to fix a tap while being pursued by an angry dog. Then an unexplained flood leads to them being sucked up by an unexplained magical portal and dumped in another dimension, or perhaps on another planet (it isn’t explained).
From here, it feels like the script has been written either by a chatbot or (more likely) was hammered out in a marketing meeting.
After the evil turtle Bowser ( Jack Black) takes his army to the borders of the cutesy kingdom of Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-joy), the siblings have to save the day by jumping around while promoting titles from the game franchise.
For reasons that make little narrative sense, we see the rainbow road chase from Super Mario Kart, the spooky house from Luigi’s Mansion, and the platformjumping, barrel-throwing showdown from Donkey Kong.
For the first 10 minutes or so, the hiring of comic actors like Pratt, Day, Black and Seth Rogen (he voices the ape) seemed to make sense. But there’s a jarring shortage of jokes in the rest of it. Perhaps one day, we’ll hear stories of interfering game executives. I think I’d rather rewatch the first film.
It feels like the script was written by a chatbot or marketing team