Mamma mia! 'The Super Mario Bros. Movie' is colorful fun for kiddos
Animated tale is based on the classic video game series, and moves just like the games play.
A brightly colored, thinly plotted hodgepodge of game references, in-jokes and fan service, "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" is a delight for any 7-year-olds looking to see their favorite video game transposed onto the big screen and a tolerable-enough translation for anyone older than the intended target audience.
In other words, it's a perfectly respectable entity for something called "The Super Mario Bros. Movie," and it's low stakes enough that it's embarrassing there was ever an online uproar over whether Chris Pratt was qualified enough to say "it's a-me!" in Mario voice.
There's Pratt, Mario-ing it up in the lead role, one half of Nintendo's Mario Bros. (the film doesn't address whether or not Mario is their last name, a question that was tackled by the 1993 live action "Super Mario Bros." movie) who is going about his business, plumbing in Brooklyn with his brother Luigi (voice of "It's Always Sunny's" Charlie Day) when they're both accidentally whisked away into a warp zone pipe.
Luigi is off to the Dark Lands, ruled by the evil Bowser (Jack Black). And Mario winds up in the Mushroom Kingdom, where he teams up with Toad (Keegan-Michael Key), who introduces him to the benevolent Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy).
Peach will take Mario to find his brother and defeat Bowser, but first she has to essentially teach him how to play "Super Mario Bros." That involves getting power-ups, busting blocks, driving karts and the like.
On their journey they meet Donkey Kong (Seth Rogen), who helps them along their way. It's all pretty standard stuff and zips right along; Princess Peach is given an origin story that takes up no more than 30 seconds of screen time, which speaks to the film's expedited sense of storytelling.
References to all things "Mario" (from "The Super Mario Bros. Super Show" of the 1990s to various games and characters across the "Super Mario" canon) are splashed across the screen and soundtracked to a bunch of '80s songs, and several scenes are rendered as side-scrolling adventures, recalling the gameplay of the earliest "Mario" games. Directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic strive make everything look and feel how "Super Mario" plays, which is a compliment to its overall design.
And they, along with screenwriter Matthew Fogel, don't get bogged down in making "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" clever or ironic, or making it play to a wider, hipper, audience (although one early sequence, set to an instrumental from "Kill Bill," earns groans). It's a sincere piece of children's entertainment based on a massively popular property, no more and, to its credit, no less.
'The Super Mario Bros. Movie'
GRADE: B
Rated PG: for action and mild violence
Running time: 92 minutes
In theaters
agraham@detroitnews.com
@grahamorama