REVIEW: The Super Mario Bros. Movie

Some die-hard fans of the franchise may have to correct me, but I don't remember Mario having a solid backstory. Or any backstory. I'm pretty sure he just emerged fully grown from a sewer pipe one day and started chucking turtle shells at mushrooms for fun.

I remember, for example, that Mario and Luigi are canonically brothers, yet there's little opportunity in the video games to explore anything like a relationship between them. That's domain better trod by film.

And this weekend's feature film adaptation from Illumination does succeed in carving out character, personality, and history for all the players on the board. The fact that Mario and Luigi are brothers isn't just a way to excuse their nearly identical apparel. Their relationship is the foundation for Mario's quest. Even more impressive is that the film reaches its degree of texture with its characters without cramming in exposition overload. This is one area where the shorter runtime of a family film maybe helps keep the film focused, but there appears to be an equal and opposite reaction.

It feels at times that this adaptation is so intent on proving that video games can actually work as feature films that it loses itself in its desperation to be just like all the other movies already on your nephew's Netflix queue, sacrificing any identity of its own. Make no mistake--this adaptation goes out of its way to remind the viewer of Mario's specific history from his 40 years of video gaming. This is a movie dripping with homage. It's the tone and general aesthetic that keep the film in the middle lane.

In a similar vein, the film expects the viewer’s familiarity with the property to cover a lot of the story’s connective tissue. Peach is really quick to trust that this mustachioed foreigner is somehow the key to protecting her kingdom. I don’t expect Tolkien-level of worldbuilding from a 90-minute film, certainly not from a universe that already sports such delightfully sporadic elements. And I commend the writers for finding a believable reason to feature Rainbow Road in this narrative (and to honestly portray it as the warzone that it is). That said, I don’t think I’m ungrateful for asking for a more compelling tension than whether or not Bowser's prom date is going to have apocalyptic repercussions.

From the film’s all-star voice cast, about half of the players feel the need to disguise their celebrity. Some (Jack Black or Keegan-Michael Key) wouldn’t be spotted by the unknowing listener. Others (Chris Pratt, Anya-Taylor Joy, and Seth Rogen) bring their full selves to the role. Whichever method the performer chooses, the actor ultimately serves the character. I’d single out Charlie Day as Luigi as our MVP here for always keeping this little brother's duress at the forefront without ever making him come off as snivelly or shrill.

Similarly, the character animators deserve special recognition for grounding this skittle-colored odyssey in recognizable pathos. It can’t be easy articulating complex thought from such cartoonish designs, even if (especially if?) they're some of the most iconic, but the animation affords the characters a whole new dimension of emotion beyond the range of 16 squares.

For all the hero's enduring popularity, it's easy to forget that Mario has always been an underdog. An honest, working-class champion of the little guy who happens to get thrown into an explosively colorful world that is so much larger than him. That's not something this film overlooks. For how conventional this film sometimes likes to play itself, this is a film that remembers where it came from.

--The Professor

Comments

"When Did Disney Get So Woke?!" pt. 1 The Disney of Your Childhood

So, I’m going to put out a somewhat controversial idea here today: The Walt Disney Company has had a tremendous amount of influence in the pop culture landscape, both in recent times and across film history. Further controversy: a lot of people really resent Disney for this. I’ve spent a greater part of this blog’s lifetime tracking this kind of thing. I have only a dozen or so pieces deconstructing the mechanics of these arguments and exposing how baseless these claims tend to be. This sort of thing is never that far from my mind. But my general thoughts on the stigmatization of the Disney fandom have taken a very specific turn in recent times against recent headlines. The Walt Disney Company has had some rather embarrassing box office flops in the last two or three years, and a lot of voices have been eager to link Disney’s recent financial woes to certain choices. Specifically, this idea that Disney has all the sudden “gone woke.” Now,...

"When Did Disney Get So Woke?!" pt. 2 Disney vs the 21st Century

In the first half of this series , we looked at this construction of the Disney image that the company has sold itself on for several decades now. Walt himself saw the purpose of his entertainment enterprise as depiction a happier world than that which he and the audience emerged from, and that formed the basis of his formidable fanbase. But because the larger culture only knows how to discuss these things in the context of consumerism, a lot of intricacies get obscured in the conversation about The Walt Disney Company, its interaction with larger culture, and the people who happily participate in this fandom. Basically, critics spent something like fifty years daring The Walt Disney Company to start being more proactive in how they participated in the multi-culture. And when Disney finally showed up in court to prove its case, the world just did not know what to do ... The 21st Century With the development of the inter...

An Earnest Defense of Passengers

Recall with me, if you will, the scene in Hollywood December 2016. We were less than a year away from #MeToo, and the internet was keenly aware of Hollywood’s suffocating influence on its females on and off screen but not yet sure what to do about it. Enter Morten Tyldum’s film Passengers , a movie which, despite featuring the two hottest stars in Hollywood at the apex of their fame, was mangled by internet critics immediately after take-off. A key piece of Passengers ’ plot revolves around the main character, Jim Preston, a passenger onboard a spaceship, who prematurely awakens from a century-long hibernation and faces a lifetime of solitude adrift in outer space; rather than suffer through a life of loneliness, he eventually decides to deliberately awaken another passenger, Aurora Lane, condemning her to his same fate. So this is obviously a film with a moral dilemma at its center. Morten Tyldum, direc...

The Paradox of The Graduate

If you've been following my writings for long, you might know that I'm really not a fan of American Beauty . I find its depiction of domestic America scathing, reductive, and, most of all, without insight. I don't regret having dedicated an entire essay to how squirmy the film is, or that it's still one of my best-performing pieces. But maybe, one might say, I just don't like films that critique the American dream? Maybe I think that domestic suburbia is just beyond analysis or interrogation. To that I say ... I really like The Graduate . I find that film's observations both more on-point and more meaningful. I think it's got great performances and witty dialogue, and it strikes the balance between drama and comedy gracefully. And I'm not alone in my assessment. The Graduate was a smash hit when it was released in 1967, landing on five or six AFI Top 100 lists in the years since. But what's int...

REVIEW: ELIO

Here's a fact: the term "flying saucer" predates the term "UFO." The United States Air Force found the former description too limiting to describe the variety of potential aerial phenomena that might arise when discussing the possibility of life beyond earth. There may have to be a similar expansion of vocabulary within the alien lexicon with Pixar's latest film, Elio , turning the idea of an alien abduction into every kid's dream come true. The titular Elio is a displaced kid who recently moved in with his aunt after his parents died. She doesn't seem to understand him any better than his peers do. He can't imagine a place on planet earth where he feels he fits in. What's a kid to do except send a distress cry out into the great, big void of outer space? But m iracle of miracles: his cries into the universe are heard, and a band of benevolent aliens adopt him into their "communiverse" as the honorary ambassador o...

Tangled: Disney Sees the Light

On November 21st, 2010, The LA Times ran its article “ Disney Animation is Closing the Book on Fairy Tales .” It pronounced that although the Walt Disney company was built on films in the style of Sleeping Beauty and The Little Mermaid , that form of Disney magic was history, reporting, iCarly (2007) “Among girls, princesses and the romanticized ideal they represent — revolving around finding the man of your dreams — have a limited shelf life. With the advent of ‘tween’ TV, the tiara-wearing ideal of femininity has been supplanted by new adolescent role models such as the Disney Channel’s Selena Gomez and Nickelodeon’s Miranda Cosgrove.” “You’ve got to go with the times,” MGA Chief Executive Isaac Larian said. “You can’t keep selling what the mothers and the fathers played with before. You’ve got to see life through their lens.” Th e same day this article ran, the executives at Disney disavowed the viewpoints expressed and assured the public that Disney was NOT in fact s...

REVIEW: The Long Walk

I suppose we owe some respect to the new film adaptation of The Long Walk . Based on one of the earliest novels by Stephen King, this sort of ancestor to The Hunger Games sees a group of boys, living in an authoritarian society. willingly entering an annual state-sponsored competition in which they all embark on a nationwide walk, all maintaining a consistent walking pace. If they fall below that, they get a bullet to the cranium. Last boy walking wins. Full credit, there aren't a lot of studio films that stitch together a solid piece of entertainment with such basic materials. There's minimal computer-generation and only a handful of actors, none of whom are really household names. (The obvious exception being Mark Hamill.) Much of the film is portrayed in relaxed long-takes that really let the actors' charisma shine. This movie proves that creative film language can be enough to turn a walk down the country road into a full-on warzone. But the movie has a system error t...

My Crush on Sarah Connor is Hard to Explain

I had an experience this last fall working at a residential treatment facility for boys with behavioral issues. My boys had been dying all week to watch Black Widow. These boys very seldom got to watch new movies while they were with us except for special field trips or when on home visits, and this movie had only just become available on Disney+. The staff all agreed to let them have a special viewing as a reward for their deep cleaning leading up to Parents' Weekend. I was really proud of my boys for their enthusiasm. I took it as a token of their evolving social awareness that they were as excited for a female-led superhero pic as they had been for Falcon and the Winter Soldier. My boys were becoming little feminists, or so I thought. Imagine my disappointment when we finally watched the film and they spent the entire runtime catcalling Natasha and her sister. An entire film dedicated to a powerful heroine moving heaven and earth to ...

Do You Hear the People Sing?: "Les Miserables" and the Untrained Singer

Perhaps no film genre is as neglected in the 21 st century as the musical. With rare exception, the o nly offerings we get are the occasional Disney film, the occasional remake of a Disney film, and adaptations of Broadway stage shows. When we are graced with a proper musical film, the demand is high among musical fans for optimum musical performance, and when a musical film doesn’t deliver this, these fans are unforgiving. From the moment talking was introduced in cinema, the musical film has been a gathering place where vocal demigods assemble in kaleidoscopic dance numbers in a whirl of cinematic ecstasy too fantastical for this world. What motivation, then, could Tom Hooper possibly have for tethering this landmark of modern musical fandom in grounded, dirty reality? This movie’s claim to fame is the use of completely live-singing, detailed in this featurette, something no previous movie musical had attempted to...

REVIEW: The Legend of Ochi

This decade has seen a renaissance of movies claiming to be "this generation's ET ," but you probably can't remember their names any better than I can. We could have all sorts of debates why it is no one seems to know how to access that these days, though I don't think for a moment that it's because 2020s America is actually beyond considering what it means to touch that childhood innocence. But A24's newest film, The Legend of Ochi , does have me thinking this mental block is mostly self-inflicted by a world whose extoling of childhood is more driven by a dislike of the older generation than anything else. Fitting together narratives like How to Train Your Dragon with Fiddler on the Roof and tossing it in the sock drawer with 1980s dark fantasy, The Legend of Ochi is intermittently enchanting, but it's undermined by its own cynicism. On an island stepped out of time, a secluded community wages war against the local population of ...

Films and Feelings

Search This Blog