A broken water main in Brooklyn is an opportunity for Mario (Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day) to get their fledgling plumbing business off the ground, but a weird pipe accidentally sends them into an alternate dimension. Separated, Mario lands in the Mushroom Kingdom while Luigi winds up in the Dark Lands and is immediately taken prisoner. Mario asks Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) for help. Fortunately, she was already planning to recruit allies to stop Bowser's (Jack Black) reign of conquest. She and Mario travel to meet Donkey Kong (Fred Armison) and his son (Seth Rogan) to get a large enough army to challenge the Koopa King.
The big controversy was Chris Pratt as Mario instead of longtime Mario voice actor Charles Martinet, even after Martinet said it was fine. Studios always want to slap celebrity voices into animated movies but it is very rare that people push back on it. Well, I have watched it and I'm here to tell you... the voice acting is not the problem here.
This entire movie feels like it was written by a committee of 50-year-old men who thought making a kid's movie was going to be easy. It is nostalgia bait masquerading as a plot. There's no character development, all the jokes are obvious, and there's no emotional core. It is just as shallow as the original side-scroller, where each set piece is just another obstacle to get to the end. The nicest thing you could say about it is that it's fine as background noise while you play games on your phone.
What really sucks is that the animation is incredible. It's crisp, vibrant, color-saturated, and felt like it had weight. And it's completely wasted on a shitty cash grab of a film. The 1990 Super Mario Bros. may have been a laughingstock but at least it took risks. This version is overshadowed by fear of failure at the box office, so every edge has been rounded down until it's completely inoffensive, bland, boring, and tasteless. What a waste.
It's streaming on Peacock if you need a two-hour nap.
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