The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023)

Rated PG for being a little scary.  Once.  But that once did make me anxious for the real little ones.   We took the whole family for this one because it was a Mario movie from Illumination.  The only really scary part is when Luigi lands in Bowser's domain and they played up the skeleton turtles.  But it's a pretty clean  movie otherwise.  It was nice to see a kids movie specifically made for kids.  PG.

DIRECTORS: Aaron Hovarth, Michael Jelenic, and Pierre Leduc

I used my Spring Break as a time to destress from watching too many movies and writing about them.  I feel really cobwebby right now and I apologize if I miss some of the nuance of the...um...Super Mario Bros. Movie.  Honestly, I wish I wrote this immediately after seeing the movie because the traction that this blog woud have might be slightly better.  But that's okay.

The only thing that I'm confident to write is the lessons that filmmakers should take away from a movie like The Super Mario Bros. Movie. Video game movies were the hardest things to crack for a really long time.  It was a joke.  Part of the issue is that it tended to be this balance between a solid story and staying true to the source material.  But The Super Mario Movie is more about staying true to the tone than it is about staying close to the source material.  I want to talk about this very specific difference for way too long because I might not have much to say about it.  I'm going to compare Super Mario to Max Payne.  Both are examples of films that stay true (for the most part) to the source material.  Yet, I hope we can all stand behind the notion that Max Payne was no good and Super Mario is a delight that everyone should watch and have a good time with.  I'm sure that there were a lot of frustrated studio execs looking at Max Payne and wondering what went wrong.  After all, that movie absolutely was the game to the point of being borderline annoying.  But Super Mario somehow succeeds?

Part of the logic lies in the fact that Max Payne, in of an in itself, is trying to be cinematic as a game.  Making a pastiche of something that's already working as homage to a medium seems a bit too insular. But also, Super Mario unapologetically loves its source material without feeling devoted to making every bit of Mario lore make sense.  There's something really bizarre about Mario to begin with: the story was never really supposed to make sense.  Mario, for all of the things that followed in the hallowed halls of Mario canon, was a sprite that had to get to the end of each board, only to be told that the princess was in another castle.  That was it.  Everything that we were told about that character came from outside sources for long periods of time.  It was from instruction manuals and Nintendo Power.  And those stories didn't make a lick of sense. I'm sure that had to be both a burden and incredibly freeing at the same time.  Here's the things we absolutely know about the Mario Brothers from Nintendo Power and the like: The Mario Brothers are plumbers from Brooklyn.  For some reason, they have to save Princess Peach from Bowser / Koopa in the Mushroom Kingdom.  The end.  Sure, there's a couple of other details in there that have come up over the course of some games, but it's all gobbelty-gook anyways.

I do have to be critical of the movie though, right?  I mean, I want to lavish praise on this movie, but I do have one really big question.  Story wise: this thing is too simple.  I don't mind that.  This is a movie meant for kids and it is unapologetically kid friendly.  Keep the story simple.  But I believe that any audience, Super Mario friendly or no, could follow the basic plot, there is something slightly unapproachable about having that deep of a Mario lore surrounding the story.  I mean, the movie hinges on you knowing what a Super Star does.  That's the climax of the film.  Bowser is holding onto a star.  The stars do different things in different games, so we're all left with a series of answers.  But imagine you hadn't played a Mario game.  All of the sudden, our heroes are on the ropes and everything looks hopeless and all of the sudden, the two protagonists are suddenly unkillable?  Any other story that pulled that card would be unforgivable.  But for Mario, if you are a Mario fan, of course that's the answer you want.  It's the ending to Superman: The Movie.  Seconds before Superman decides to go back in time, we're reminded that he shouldn't mess with human history, but he still does.  No consequences, just it happens.  Listen, Superman is one of my favorite movies.  I love it.  But it has kind of a crummy ending.  Heck, it has the same crummy ending twice if you count the Richard Donner Cut of Superman II. The same thing happens with Mario.  It's such a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card and the bad guy just basically taunts the heroes with it.  It's also really weird that Bowser thinks that Peach would be impressed with that.  He was already unstoppable.

But that's my only real beef.  Do you know what element of the movie I'm not hearing about?  Donkey Kong.  I didn't think I would get behind the Donkey Kong stuff.  I've never really liked the Donkey Kong games, but I can't deny the connection --albeit thin --with the Mario games.  Because the filmmakers wanted to really focus on the legacy of all of Mario, down to his habit to "Kart", both as a verb and with a k, to ignore Donkey Kong would have been a mistake.  It's funny, for all I'm hearing about the Mario movie with "Peaches" and how fun it is, I don't hear much about Donkey Kong.  It's funny, because the heart of the movie is Mario's relationship with Donkey Kong.  Sure, this is a wild misread of the film because the movie is really about brothers, especially when it comes to Luigi.  But Luigi doesn't have a greater metaphor behind him.  As much as I love Luigi in this movie, there's no conflict there.  The conflict lies with Donkey Kong.  Both of these men are expected to be heroes, despite inconsistencies with archetypes.  Donkey Kong, especially considering that he's played by Seth Rogen, often fills the shoes of other Seth Rogen characters, adult man-children who could do great things if they just were given proper motivation.  He's a great foil to Mario, who should not be able to survive in this deathtrap that is the Mushroom Kingdom.  (Apparently, the Mushroom Kingdom isn't the planet, so much as a region of what must be a Nintendo land that is as-of-yet unnamed.) 

But with Donkey Kong, Mario finds a comrade-in-arms that is interesting.  I love Charlie Day and I love the fact that he plays Luigi.  But he's really serving the role of the Princess in this story.  God bless the creative team behind the movie for not making Peach the kidnapped woman in this story because I love the characterization of Peach that makes more sense in this film.  But this also means that I think that Luigi's character is going to have to change over the course of this franchise.  In this movie, Luigi has no qualms with Mario's shannanigans.  (In reality, I don't think he should have qualms.  Mario seems like a pretty good guy who's just trying his best.)  But I think this franchise might be smart to either separate them because there is no conflict between these two guys or instill some artificial conflict in future films.  (I bet it's going to be about how Mario is so in love with Peach that he doesn't have time for Luigi anymore or that Mario forgot about their dreams to open a sweet family business with his brother.)  But Donkey Kong fulfills that role of the conflict between brothers.  Sure, it's a found-family story, but it's a story that probably works better for a movie like this.

I mean, I'm not alone in saying that The Super Mario Bros. Movie works on a level that Illumination keeps presenting.  Yeah, there's some real Illumination stuff happening in the movie.  But honestly, it's a really smart IP licensing.  Illumination has never been necessarily the most high brow animation studio.  But they also know how to distill something down to the most fun version of itself.  If Super Mario had this massive history over it, coupled with a really bad live action movie in the past and a hurdle of being another "video game movie", then passing the ball to Illumination was the smart move.  It's got some goofy music cues with pop culture, but the film really works and I loved it.