The Super Mario Galaxy Movie just about achieves orbit

Video games have come a long way from being blamed for all of society’s ills.

Once dubbed the favourite activity of murderers and sociopaths by a pearl-clutching media, Hollywood is now looking to embrace video games as the next big money maker.

2023’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie made an ungodly amount of money and taught Hollywood that films based on video games can get the masses to spend money in cinemas.

Now that video games have proven their worth as a huge moneymaker for Hollywood, at a time when they desperately need one, video games now have a seat at the table.

Personally, we are waiting until Football Manager gets made into a big Hollywood movie.

Mario, of course, had a big-screen adaptation in 1993, where a clearly over it Bob Hoskins faced off against a scenery-chewing Dennis Hopper, but Hollywood smartly decided that animation was the best avenue for Mario and friends when it came time to put him back in cinemas.

Since the first Mario film came out, Five Nights At Freddy’s and Minecraft have become major franchises, the Fallout TV series has been a big hit, while the Sonic trilogy came to an end in 2024.

All the ingredients are there for The Super Mario Galaxy Movie to be as big a hit as the first movie, and ultimately, keep the lights on for cinemas.

In brief, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is more of the same, which is to say, more moments where the movie stops so you can acknowledge the reference to the games, more moments of Jack Black hamming it up, and more moments where you question why Chris Pratt is not even bothering to do the Mario voice.

This time out, the big addition is the voice of Glen Powell as Star Fox, indicating that Nintendo is aiming to assemble a Marvel-like team of their best and brightest (which means we are on track for an Ingrid Bergman-style Animal Crossing movie any day now).

Crossovers are all the rage these days, and Nintendo jamming Star Fox into the mix is handled with all the subtlety of a guest star appearing on Happy Days.

For the uninitiated, Star Fox is the Nintendo version of Han Solo, a cocky starfighter pilot who happens to be a fox (and has a frog for an engineer, in the movie’s best joke).

Yoshi is the other big addition from the Mario canon to make an appearance here, and their presence in the film merely exists to sell toys.

To justify calling this the Super Mario Galaxy Movie, Rosalina from the 2007 game is the instigating action; she is kidnapped by Bowser Junior, and it is up to Mario and friends to save her.

The movie has roughly two or three moments where it replicates what happens in the game, almost as if it’s checking off a box.

The whole affair has a distinct whiff of design by committee to it, which makes sense, as Nintendo are the one signing the cheques on this film and the film is only being made with their participation.

After the failure of the 1993 live-action movie, Nintendo swore off live-action versions of their movies and didn’t trust Hollywood to do them justice, but their involvement with the 2023 movie (and the subsequent mountain of money it made) changed their tune.

Trying to review a film like this is strangely a challenge for a critic; it can’t be judged on the same merit as a film like One Battle After Another, and it’s not operating on the same realm as a film like Sentimental Value.

To try to understand this film, you have to imagine how this film would play if you were a 10-year-old seeing it for a friend’s birthday party, and if you are one of the adults in the room.

On those grounds, The Super Mario Galaxy movie is just fine; nothing ground-breaking that pushes animation forward as a medium like the Spider-Verse movies, but also just watchable enough that it will justify the cost of a family ticket.

In fact, considering the film is less than 100 minutes long, cinemas should show a newsreel or two beforehand to beef up the running time or have a live piano accompaniment like a Buster Keaton film.

The film is a functional machine that goes from point A to B to C and is over in less than 100 minutes; if the film has a strength, apart from the clean animation style, it is that the film knows its audience.

The film knows that anything over 1 hour 40 minutes will have people reaching for their phones or running to the toilet, so the film travels along at a fair clip, never staying in one place for too long.

As far as the plot developments go, the plot synopsis could be written on a napkin, meaning the only thing worth really talking about is the animation style and the voice performances.

Animation-wise, the film is pretty similar to the 2023 one, that is to say, done in that Despicable Me style where it’s not aiming for Pixar-style realism and detail, nor is it going for Dreamworks style craft.

The video game roots of Mario actually translate well to animation, and while we get nothing as eye-popping as the Mario Kart sequence from the first movie, the army of animators does a good job here of capturing the spirit of the games (which is the bare minimum we expect).

On the voice front, Chris Pratt continues to sound like he’s doing a Linda from Bob’s Burgers impression, Charlie Day’s ditzy energy is perfect for Luigi, and Jack Black turns in a relatively dialled-down performance for once in his life.

The stretch of the film where Mario, Bowser and Luigi all work together is where the film brushes up against being interesting; the film uses the classic trope of the hero and the bad guy working together, and for the 10 minutes where this film turns into a Midnight Run-style buddy comedy, you see the seeds of a much more interesting, and better movie.

Of course, 8 year olds aren’t clamouring for homages to 1980s action comedies (unless kids have suddenly become massive Charles Grodin fans unbeknownst to us) so that is jettisoned in favour of Yoshi eating someone.

As a whole, modern kids movies like this are a welcome improvement from the likes of Shrek, where the film stops itself every 30 seconds to make a pop culture reference or joke for the parents in the audience.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie could be better, but it could also be a lot worse, much like Liverpool’s current season.