The intrepid plumber brothers are ready for their big screen restart in the new, fully-animated and eagerly (or for some, warily) anticipated new joint The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which officially opens tomorrow, April 5, ahead of Easter weekend.
From Universal’s Illumination animation studio (Despicable Me, Sing, The Secret Life of Pets), the CG feature is an origin story for the Nintendo video game heroes, unfolding as blue collar Brooklynites Mario (voiced by Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day) are flushed down a magical pipe into the strange worlds of the Mushroom Kingdom and Bowser’s (Jack Black) dark lands, respectively. Teaming up with Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy), Mario must overcome various levels of obstacles to rescue his brother and save the kingdom from the Koopa invaders. Teen Titans Go! pros Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic direct from a script by Matt Fogel (The LEGO Movie 2).
The film is estimated to bring in at least $85 million to $90 million nationally over its five-day launch. The global projections are even better: Box-office experts believe the movie will easily make the $225 million benchmark during its opening holiday weekend.
Ahead of the film’s official debut this week, reviews are in with some very mixed reactions from the critics. The Super Mario Bros. Movie is currently sporting a meh rating of 48% on Rotten Tomatoes (from 54 reviews) and 49 on Metacritic (from 33 reviews).
As can be expected from an Illumination joint, the film’s zippy animation and beautiful renderings of the colorful Mushroom Kingdom and contrasting Inferno vibes of Bowser’s castle are top selling points across the board, as are the A list voice stars and composer Brian Tyler’s high octane soundtrack featuring new arrangements of the original game themes by Koji Kondo. However, even the reviewers who were excited by the avalanche of Easter eggs for fans of the franchise found that these winks seemed to be more of a priority than crafting a memorable story. Detractors found little more than colorful fluff, inflated by niche nostalgia.
Even though video games have rocketed up the ranks of some of the best entertainment media in recent years, and the “nerd” label of interest these worlds is a fading memory, it appears you can still be too much of a fan for some folks’ taste.
“The Super Mario Bros. Movie — the new animated cinematic collaboration between Nintendo and Illumination — is a winner for families, the perfect format for the big screen and one faithful enough not to turn off legions of fans, old and young alike. Animation is the right way to go, and directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic, together with writer Matthew Fogel turn it into a charmer, if not on the level of such Illumination favorites as Minions, Sing, The Secret Life of Pets and Despicable Me … Immensely likable and loaded with laughs, if not raging wit.”
— Pete Hammond, Deadline
“There’s a way that mainstream animation, not to mention my own taste in it, has been evolving. So much of it has become rote, with an empty fractious dazzle that doesn’t ultimately sustain interest … I’ve been most drawn to have been off the Pixar grid — movies like Trolls and Ralph Breaks the Internet, which merge a kind of kinetic virtuosity with an emotional flair that sneaks up on you. I’d put The Super Mario Bros. Movie in that camp. It’s going to be a huge, huge hit, but not just because of its beloved gamer pedigree. It’s because the movie … is a serious blast, with a spark of enchantment — that je ne sais quoi fusion of speed and trickery, magic and sophistication, and sheer play that, well, you feel it when you see it.”
— Owen Gleiberman, Variety
“The film doesn’t just have quick references to these games, it has long sequences lifted from them. Rather than moving along the plot, the directors keep making the characters run around gravity-defying aerial assault courses, or drive racing cars along a rainbow, just because that’s what happens in the games. They slow the film to a standstill every time … Matthew Fogel, the screenwriter, has done an efficient job of linking the various references, but the film has an astonishing lack of jokes, twists, memorable lines, exhilarating stunts, touching emotional moments, and anything else that might engage any viewer who isn’t playing spot-the-allusion.”
— Nicholas Barber, BBC
“The Super Mario Bros. Movie’s visual vibrance sets a very high bar for the other animated video game adaptations which will surely follow, be that from Nintendo or another studio. Bowser’s fire-versus-ice siege of the Penguin Kingdom, the expansive fungi vistas of the Mushroom Kingdom, and the lush greenery of the Kongs’ Jungle Kingdom are all super-saturated dreamscapes that coalesce into a bustling world begging to be explored further.”
— Tom Jorgensen, IGN
“The plot is as basic as can be, and character development is clearly not a priority. Considering Day’s terrific voice work as Luigi, it seems a shame that the character disappears for such long stretches. But directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic, creators of the Teen Titans Go! series, deliver a reasonably faithful big screen adaptation that, while it features plenty of juvenile humor, wisely doesn’t lean toward broad satire.”
— Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter
“This much-trailed, much-hyped new animated feature is tedious and flat in all senses, a disappointment to match the live-action version in 1993. It’s visually bland in ways that reminded me of European knockoff animations and utterly inert in narrative terms, with a baffling lack of properly funny lines … At first there are some zany and ingenious panning-right 2D-obstacle sequences pastiching the gameplay action, as if by accident, but once the brothers have left planet Earth, the game dimension has to be repeatedly, cumbersomely and boringly crowbarred into the story itself.”
— Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
“The Super Mario Bros. Movie feels like it’s made to be screen-shotted more than watched. Nearly every frame is packed with a dizzying number of Easter eggs and references to Mario games and other Nintendo franchises … This new take on Mario is so faithful in its efforts to recreate iconography from four decades of video games that there’s almost no energy left to expend on reaching the unconverted. The Super Mario Bros. Movie is a sermon for the Nintendo faithful and their children, and few others.”
— Joshua Rivera, Polygon
