Regrouting blackened bathroom tiles; filling out a commercial tax return; cleaning the mouldering leaves out of a clogged storm drain; grudgingly buying a birthday gift for a racist aunt; reviewing The Super Mario Galaxy Movie… All things that slumber in the dismal depths of your personal To Do list that you try your very best to avoid until time eventually runs out. Among the menial domestic tasks listed above, reviewing The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is perhaps laced with the highest level of residual disappointment, as it involves having to grapple with the notion of wasted talent and group capitulation to cynical corporate homogenisation on an epic scale.
Prior to the release of 2023’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie, there were reasons to be cautiously optimistic that this wouldn’t just be glossy sponsored content aimed to peddle the innovative yet addictive wares of the Nintendo corporation. Co-directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic were responsible for one of the sharpest and most sassy TV animations of the 21st century in the form of Teen Titans Go!, and so the maths would suggest that the pair were brought on to bring the same patina of ironic subversion to the pop-sunny world of the shroom-quaffing plumber sibs. Unfortunately, their incredible talents have been ground down to near-total anonymity, as they dutifully shepherd a second Mario-themed juggernaut that, once again, makes no bones about its function as an extended-play advertisement for Fine Nintendo Products.
The way that the film has been made is that someone has placed a list of Nintendo characters into a spreadsheet in column A, and then a list of Nintendo games have been listed in column B, and then screenwriter Matthew Fogel has mangled together a story by mixing random selections from A and B while being sure to keep a healthy amount in the chamber for inevitable 2028, 2030 and 2032 Mario franchise movies. Even the title refers directly to the 2007 Wii game in which Mario is given the power to warp around the galaxy through floating star portals and each planet on which he lands has its own theme.
There seems to be no logic to what gets a spotlight beyond being able to fill out around three or four minutes of madcap material. So we hop from Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island from 1995, in which Mario (Christ Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day) are transformed into babies who are protected by Yoshi (Donald Glover, cashing a cheque for repeating the word “Yoshi”), to the Donkey Kong Game & Watch from 1982. And that’s via an extended cameo for roundly-rejected non Mario franchise torchbearer, Star Fox (voiced by Glen Powell), a Poochie-coded “cool” fighter pilot character whose presence is as a narrative crutch to expedite a climactic showdown.
Elsewhere you’ve got stock damsel abductee Princess Rosalina (voiced by Brie Larson), floral boss bitch Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) and cutesy fussbudget Toad (Keegan-Michael Key). Mario and Luigi have to save Rosalina before Bowser (Jack Black) and the psychotic Bowser Jr (Benny Safdie) drain her stores of stardust magic (sic) to power their planet-destroying canon and take over the galaxy. The film is a depressing, joke-neutral slog, with far too many characters to create any meaningful emotional stakes or any wider emotional meaning. Black just about got some of his “loudest uncle” humour across the line in the first film, but here he falls entirely flat, never given any room to allow his schtick to breathe.
What’s most disappointing is that the raw talent is all there, and every single person involved here can be proud of having made quality, soulful, intelligent work in the past. It’s sad, then, that this chaotic compilation effort extorts their celebrity and has them make the subliminal case for an ongoing viewer journey that involves the purchase of a Switch 2 (or, in the case of parents/carers, maybe having them consider picking up a Virtual Boy on eBay).
