Criticism of ‘Super Mario Bros: The Movie’, as if the minions played the video game

There is a moment, within his constant progress towards an uncertain destination (the key to his almost theater of the absurd premise), when Mario the plumber and his adventure companions stop the dizzying rhythm of their journey and wonder about the meaning of their existence and for what impels them to continue jumping obstacles, fleeing from enemies and capturing stars or coins. It is in that isolated scene, stopped in time and in animated bytes, in which ‘Super Mario Bros.: The Movie’ is about to meet not only ‘Ready Player One’, the masterpiece of this future-present virtual, but with ‘Super Mario Bros.’, the misunderstood conversion into a live image of the mythical and endearing Nintendo video game. Thirty years ago, Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel were the ideal authors for Mario and Luigi to become Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo. They came from the future in our present which was the television ‘Max Headroom’ but their strange (and Eugene Ionesco) descent into the sewer of the 90s blockbuster was doomed to fail. Thirty years later, ‘Super Mario Bros.: The Movie’ turns to three-dimensional cartoons to give life (lives) to its characters. Go to the contrasting style of the Illumination studio as if the minions were playing a game of the game that gives the film its title.

Conceived as an all-star and a tourist/fetish tour of the various items in the video game, the film by Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic written by Matthew Fogel (not coincidentally in the latest Gru/Minions) seems to pay more attention to all its winks for the initiated than in building a foundational or simply self-referential story (which in fact is more than anything else). It is true that the vast majority of his gags work, that Donkey Kong steals every scene in which he appears and that his look is one of those that melts even the most reluctant to these experiments, but already set to carry out the umpteenth remake of ‘The Wizard of Oz’ it would have been good to risk as the seminal ‘Tron’ did, which was, of course, the digital yellow brick road and which knew how to fail because at all times it endowed its characters of doubt about who they really were, if they really had life or were electronic impulses.

‘Super Mario Bros.: The Movie’ is not ‘Tron’, it wouldn’t even occur to them (us) to ask it to be ‘Blade Runner’ and that’s good (for the general public and the box office) that it is a colorful and highly entertaining mix between ‘Wreck It Ralph’, ‘The Lego Movie’ (again Chris Pratt as a hero in the VO) and ‘Angry Birds’. However, there it is, in that minuscule minute (almost from Game Boy), the movie that could have been: the one that, upon reaching the Game Over, would have found the damn one in real image from 1993. That would have been a conclusion to match. from that of ‘Planet of the Apes’, the canonical of Franklin J. Schaffner.

For intrepid plumbers nostalgic for the innocence of the classic video game

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DATA SHEET

Address: Aaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic Country: USA Year: 2023 Release date: 5–4-2023 Gender: Animation Script: Matthew Fogel Duration: 92 min.

Synopsis: A plumber named Mario travels through an underground maze with his brother, Luigi, trying to save a captured princess.