93 min | PG | April 5, 2023 | Universal Pictures
Two Brooklyn plumbers fall down a warp pipe and land in the Mushroom Kingdom. Mario sets out to rescue his brother and stop Bowser from conquering every realm. The movie is a theme park ride that never pretends to be anything else.
Mario and Luigi are two Brooklyn plumbers trying to launch their own business. A broken water main pulls them into a network of pipes that drops Mario in the Mushroom Kingdom and Luigi into the clutches of Bowser. Mario teams with Princess Peach to stop Bowser from conquering every realm and forcing Peach into marriage. Illumination builds the whole film around recognition. Every frame loads in another piece of Nintendo iconography. The story exists to move the audience from one familiar landmark to the next.
Chris Pratt plays Mario without the accent and without much else, delivering a generic everyman where the character needs something specific. Anya Taylor-Joy gives Princess Peach genuine command. Her Peach runs the kingdom and drags Mario through a punishing obstacle course with real impatience. Jack Black plays Bowser as an operatic romantic who pounds out a piano ballad about his crush on Peach, and he is the only performer who builds a full character. Charlie Day gives Luigi nervous energy in his limited screen time. Seth Rogen plays Donkey Kong as a preening frat boy and lets his own laugh carry the joke.
Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic direct with relentless pace and never let a scene breathe. Matthew Fogel’s script strings together set pieces and skips the connective tissue that would give them weight. The animation renders every surface with Illumination’s signature gloss, from the brick textures of the warp pipes to the chrome of the karts. Brian Tyler’s score weaves Koji Kondo’s original Nintendo themes into a full orchestral treatment, and those melodies do more emotional work than the dialogue. The Rainbow Road kart chase stands out as the one sequence where the staging and the editing lock into a genuine rhythm.
The film knows exactly who it serves and serves them efficiently. It moves fast enough that the thin story never has time to collapse. The pleasures here are the pleasures of recognition. You see a Power Star, a fire flower, a familiar level, and the film trusts that the memory carries the moment. That trust is well placed and also the ceiling. This is a competent delivery system for nostalgia that mistakes assembling references for telling a story.