Review of The Super Mario Bros. Movie

This has been the movie I waited so long for, and I am not afraid to admit it. As soon as I first head they were making a Mario movie, I knew I had to watch it because that was literally my childhood.

My sister and I would play Mario Party whenever we had the free time, and that was literally one of the highlights of my childhood. So my mother and I rounded up the family, including my niece and nephews, and took them out to see the Mario movie.

Thanks to my AMC A List and the fact I randomly had an AMC gift card, this only cost us about $30 for six people and two buckets of popcorn.

The theater I saw it in was completely sold out, full of adults and kids alike. I think that’s the best way to see these kinds of movies. Even the young kids in the theater knew exactly what the references were, as the kid two seats down from me even recognized the Luigi’s Mansion theme song tinkering in the background of one scene. Seems like a lot of people were diehard fans in this screening, which made it so much better when all of the little Easter eggs you’d understand if you were a fan showed up.

Onwards with the review!

Deemed failures in the real world, Mario and Luigi find themselves sucked into an alternate universe where it is up to Mario to save the day.

This movie kind of serves as an origin story for the Mario Brothers. We open the movie in Brooklyn, New York, where they live with their family and just invested all of their money into a commercial on television advertising their plumbing services.

After giving degraded by their former boss in a pizza shop, the dejected brothers get a phone call asking for their services. It’s a wealthy customer, but when the family’s dog ends up attacking them because Luigi broke its bone, the brothers end up accidentally destroying the entire apartment’s bathroom.

They go home to their family, but when Mario discovers that Brooklyn is weirdly flooding, he decides it’s their chance to prove their worth.

They end up in the New York sewers, where, after stumbling upon an abandoned section further below the ground, Luigi is sucked into a green pipe and isn’t seen again. Mario heads into the pipe, where he, too, is sucked into it.

While they hold hands after catching up to each other in the vortex created between that green pipe and the next, Luigi is separated from Mario and ends up being chased by a horde of Skull Bones.

He finds an abandoned mansion, drops his flashlight, and is then captured by a group of Shy Guys who then take him to Bowser. Luigi is put into a cage, with his only companion being the captured Penguins and a little blue star that is lowkey suicidal and cheering about all of their impending deaths.

In the other side story at the beginning, setting up the conflict immediately is Bowser and his army of Koopas attacking an ice kingdom full of penguins. He easily overtakes them with his army because they’re small and incapable of really fighting back, and gains a star in the process, making him invincible.

His ultimate goal is to take over the Mushroom Kingdom and marry Peach, but he seems unwilling to accept that she might not marry him (spoiler: it’s obvious she won’t). There’s a strange musical number at this point in the movie, which leans into kid territory, but it works.

Mario ends up in the Mushroom Kingdom, when an adventure Toad takes him in and sneaks him into Peach’s palace. There, Mario meets Peach and she decides to team up with him despite him not knowing the ways of their world, and they head off to the Donkey Kingdom in order to ask for their arm.

There, Mario narrowly defeats Donkey Kong, and earns the Donkey army. But when they get their go karts and head onto the Rainbow Road, but Bowser’s spies find out about this and ambush everyone, defeating the Donkey army and leaving Mario and Donkey Kong inside of a fish’s mouth. They escape, but Peach has already returned to the Kingdom and surrendered to Bowser at this point.

Peach freezes Bowser at their wedding, and Mario and Donkey Kong come in as reinforcements. Bowser pulls out his trump card when free from the ice, the massive Bullet Bill, and Mario redirects it by sending it through the pipe in which he came from.

Then everyone and everything gets sucked into the real world of Brooklyn, and they have their final showdown on the streets. Apparently this is normal for this world’s New York City. Anyways, Mario and Luigi take down Bowser, end up living in the Mushroom Kingdom, and the end of the movie implies there’ll be another one with a Yoshi.

Overall Thoughts

It’s a fun movie. There are some moments that I would dare to say aren’t for kids, especially when Donkey Kong keeps asking Mario if he’s flirting with Peach.

I would say as a Mario fan who grew up with a different kind of voice acting, the celebrities are fine, but because I’m so used to hearing a certain sound from these characters, I wasn’t impressed by the celebrities being involved with the movie. I like professional voice actors in these contexts, and I think we should give them more work.

It is unfortunate that celebrities sell more at the end of the day, but what can us mere mortals do. Go see this one if you’re a fan.

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