The Super Mario Bros. Movie

The Plumber and the Pastiche

A movie about Mario has an immediate problem: what exactly do you build a story around when your hero’s main defining trait is that he jumps? The games have spent four decades treating plot like scaffolding, just enough to get you to the next inspired obstacle course. So when Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic took on *The Super Mario Bros. Movie*, they had to translate pure motion into an actual narrative. Their answer is basically to never stop moving. The film plays less like a carefully shaped adventure than like someone flinging open the doors to a candy store and telling you to run.



The opening in Brooklyn gives Mario (Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day) a touch more texture than I expected. They’re blue-collar brothers trying to make a plumbing business work, stuck under the gaze of a family that doesn’t think much of their chances. For a few minutes, the movie almost passes as a scruffy little comedy. Then the green pipe arrives, and the Mushroom Kingdom blows the doors off. Illumination renders it with a glossy, tactile sheen—you can almost feel the fuzz, plastic, and shell textures on everything in sight. It looks great. The trade-off is that the pacing is so caffeinated the movie barely pauses long enough for you to really sit in any of it. Whether that feels exhilarating or exhausting probably depends on how much sugar your brain can take.



The emotional center, such as it is, belongs to Bowser. Jack Black walks off with the movie by turning Nintendo’s usual stomping reptile into a needy, theatrical metalhead nursing a gigantic crush. It’s a ridiculous idea, which is exactly why it works. Black has spent years refining a style of operatic, sweat-drenched absurdity with Tenacious D, and he pours all of that into Bowser’s obsession with Princess Peach. The high point is still the piano scene. Bowser sits down at that peach-colored instrument, taps out a few tentative notes, and then launches into "Peaches" with total, wounded commitment. Variety's Owen Gleiberman rightly compared the performance to "Meat Loaf's songs on *Bat Out of Hell*." The bit lands because Black never steps outside it to smirk.



Everything else is basically a very expensive victory lap through Nintendo iconography, and the Rainbow Road set piece is where that approach peaks. Mario, Peach, and Seth Rogen’s smug Donkey Kong hurtle down a glowing track hanging over cosmic nothingness while shells and banana peels zip across the screen. The camera spins around the karts so aggressively it starts to mimic the games’ panic and drift. It’s a lot, in the best and worst sense. I found myself gripping the armrest like I was holding a controller. Does any of this amount to a grand statement about life? Absolutely not. But the movie knows its job. It is bright, fast, frictionless fun, and sometimes clearing the jump is the whole point.