Super Mario Bros. (2023)
I took my daughter to see the new Mario Bros. movie the other day. She loved it. It was her first time at the movies.
I remember being a child and being taken to the movies. Back when you didn’t really have a sense of whether something was good or not (unless it was boring). You just cared about the experience.
The lucky kid spotted a friend from school walking in before the previews started. So we ended up sitting with them which made the experience that much better for her.
As for the movie? It was… fine. I guess? It’s pretty shallow. I guess if you wanted to be generous you could say it’s a kid movie, so what do you expect (and of course the answer is that kid movies are actually quite good these days and I expect more.
Charlie Day as Luigi is fun. Jack Black as Bowser is great. Chris Pratt’s accent kept making me think about what on earth he was doing. Not because it was particularly bad but it just… shifted… a lot.
But there’s no story. It’s all just fan service all the time. Quick, think of the most popular Mario properties. Got that firmly in your head? Now imagine stringing them together. You have now watched the Mario Bros. movie. There’s a section that apes Donkey Kong (see what I did there? cause Donkey Kong is an ape and it’s like a double… no, it’s okay, you get it). There is a Mario Kart section. There is a Super Mario Bros. section.
Because the technology is there these days to be able to accurately (which is a weird term to us when it comes to adapting a video game to film) represent those games. If you have played those games and thought ‘hey, it would be great if I could sit in a cinema and watch this happening but I don’t want to have to watch Youtube Let’s Play videos’ then this will hit the right beats for you.
It got me thinking about the change in how Hollywood approaches properties these days (ie. in the days of the monoculture).
Once upon a time, an IP that had as much name recognition as Mario would be stripped of parts and then a studio exec would say “But, we can’t tell a story using these parts that is the video game because the video game doesn’t really have a story and even if it did then we’d turn off the audience. We can get them in the door with the name but then we need to ground this is in reality.”
And that is how you get Super Mario Bros. (1993).
And that shit… was fucking bugnuts.
I sometimes wish Hollywood would still swing for crap like that.
The game has completely changed now. Now it’s all about fidelity to the IP. Because audiences (or the vocal part of the audiences) have proven over the past decade and a half that if you don’t present something very precisely faithful to the IP that they either won’t show up or if they do they will howl about how you’ve murdered their dreams on social media (or my favourite variation… start a petition to have the film struck from canon, as though that is a thing).
Which is exactly what Super Mario Bros. (2023) does.
At the expense of story.
Which is odd because it seems like it would be pretty easy to shoehorn in classic story beats with a Mario skin on top. He refuses the call. He sets out on the adventure. He adjusts to the new world. He runs into obstacles that he initially can’t overcome but then he learns something and can. He meets enemies that become allies. He faces down the final boss with the lessons he has learned and the allies he has gained and is victorious. Then he returns to Brooklyn.
And the crazy thing is, it would actually be very simple to take the movie as it is and get to those beats. In some ways, it’s almost like it is doing the beats without the work of the beats.
Because the thing is, you want to know what the moral of the movie is? “If you get the right powerups at the right time, then you will win.” That’s it. I mean, you could strip out at the Nintendo theme, make it about cycling and call it The Lance Armstrong Story and it would pretty much be about the same thing.
Mario doesn’t learn anything. Luigi being in danger doesn’t matter. Peach sort of plays the role of mentor to Mario but as he learns nothing she’s probably not got her teaching certificate.
Which if you’re 5 is probably fine. My daughter keeps going on about the movie and the scene where all the Toad’s say “But we’re adorable” (which is an amusing beat when it happens). But when there is more on offer when it comes to kids films, I’m not sure why you would bother turning out.
I get wanting something bright and fun that you can have a couple of chuckles at. That’s fine. It just all feels so cycnical.
Still, the new Spiderverse movie is only a few months away and that looks like it is going to slap.