A shallow plot and advert-adjacent cameos justify the critics’ condemnation of Nintendo’s latest film. But there’s sincere affection for the universe here, too
I
was bracing myself for the worst when I headed into the cinema with my children to watch the new Super Mario Galaxy movie over the Easter break. The reviews have been memorably dire. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw called it worse than AI; Empire deemed it a “humourless, hysterical trudge”. It’s been vilified even more than the first Mario movie, which film critics also hated.
I am a lifelong Nintendo fan, though – I literally wrote the book on the company – so even if it was terrible, there was a possibility that the Mario-loving child within me might temporarily take over my critical faculties and get me through it. That’s what happened with the first Mario movie, which I found to be perfectly OK. I was not actively offended by it, as the film critics seemed to be; audiences seemed to land mostly in my camp, if the huge discrepancy between its audience ratings and review ratings were any indication. Could the sequel really be that much worse?
Here’s the thing: it’s not great. Instead of developing anything that happened in the first Mario movie, which was extremely light on plot already, it pretty much launches straight into an unrelated caper in which Mario, Luigi and Peach – now accompanied by Yoshi, voiced by Donald Glover, not that you’d be able to tell from the 30 variations of “YOSHI!” that comprise his dialogue – zoom through the galaxy in search of star princess Rosalina. It is powerfully bright and colourful: almost every scene is an action sequence in which someone kicks a bunch of Koopa-kingdom ass. There aren’t really any jokes, and the main comic asset of the first movie – Jack Black’s take on Bowser – has been disappointingly defanged.
