The Super Mario Bros. Movie

The Infinite 1-Up

For three decades, the specter of the 1993 live-action *Super Mario Bros.* haunted Nintendo like a glitch in an otherwise perfect save file. That film—a dystopian, cyberpunk fever dream—was a fascinating failure because it tried to interpret the source material rather than transcribe it. Aaron Horvath’s 2023 animated correction, *The Super Mario Bros. Movie*, is the antithesis of that risky creative leap. It is a film that functions less as a narrative and more as a pristine, hermetically sealed shrine to a collective childhood. It does not ask us to imagine a new world; it asks us to remember the one we have already conquered a thousand times.

Visually, the film is a triumph of texture over text. Illumination, a studio known for the kinetic, sugar-rush energy of *Despicable Me*, here restrains its anarchic impulses to serve the "House of Miyamoto." The animation renders the Mushroom Kingdom with a tactility that borders on the edible; the glistening red shells and gelatinous blue mushrooms invoke a sensory memory that bypasses the brain and hits the dopamine receptors directly. The camera work is particularly ingenious in how it subtly mimics the vernacular of gameplay. In key sequences, the perspective shifts to a flat, side-scrolling axis or tracks behind a kart drifting on Rainbow Road, triggering a phantom sensation in the viewer’s thumbs. We are not just watching Mario run; we are feeling the ghost of the controller in our hands.

Yet, beneath this immaculate candy coating, the narrative struggles to find oxygen. The script moves with the efficiency of a speedrunner, terrified that if it lingers on a quiet moment, the audience might realize the hollowness of the plot. Characters are less people and more avatars toggling between emotional states. Mario, voiced with a safe, indistinct earnestness by Chris Pratt, is stripped of his Italian caricature but given little personality to replace it. He is the Everyman Hero, a blank slate designed for projection rather than empathy.

The film’s beating heart—and its only source of genuine, chaotic friction—is Jack Black’s Bowser. While the rest of the cast treats the material with the reverence of a Sunday school lesson, Black understands the inherent absurdity of a fire-breathing turtle obsessed with a human princess. His performance, particularly during the piano ballad "Peaches," transcends the corporate mandate. In his gravelly, melodramatic crooning, we find a villain driven not by generic domination, but by a pathetic, deeply human loneliness. It is the only moment where the film feels dangerous, where the artifice cracks to reveal something raw and weird.

Ultimately, *The Super Mario Bros. Movie* is a victory of brand management, a flawless translation of "assets" into cinema. It succeeds wildly as a nostalgia delivery system, a warm bath of recognition for anyone who ever blew into a Nintendo cartridge. But as a piece of filmmaking, it feels like a "perfect run" of a level we have played too many times: technically flawless, dazzling to behold, but entirely devoid of the risk that makes art memorable. It earns its 1-Up, but it never quite justifies the game.