"The Super Mario Bros. Movie" Review: Lots of Nostalgia, Little of Everything Else

Mario's return to the big screen is the equivalent of hoarding coins and never buying a star.

April 21, 2023

In 1982, video game publishers oversaturated the market with innumerable new games and consoles, but most stores lacked the space to accommodate the massive influx of merchandise. Without money to refund retailers, the video game market crashed, dropping from a $3.2 billion industry in 1983 to a $100 million industry just two years later.

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It was a lesson never learned by any industry in the history of the world: just because you can doesn’t mean you should. After all, one of the largest contributing factors to the crash was the low quality of games. Ya know, like… this…

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Quality is king; quantity is a luxury. One company understood this rule and thus produced one of the best-selling video game consoles of all time, at one point owned by nearly ⅓ of all American households: the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).

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The console’s flagship game was Super Mario Bros., released in 1985, two years after the popular arcade game Mario Bros. gave pudgy plumber Mario and his brother Luigi the spotlight. The game proved immensely popular, selling an estimated 58 million copies, and, paired with the NES, revitalized the gaming industry.

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Ever since, Mario has been the most profitable video game character of all time, a pop culture icon whose adventures in the colorful Mushroom Kingdom have enriched generations for nearly four decades. In 1993, Buena Vista released Super Mario Bros., a cinematic aim at capitalizing on the treasured IP that bombed miserably, becoming an infamous critical laughing stock, commercial disaster, and public disgrace, loathed by a global audience that did not take kindly to seeing their beloved Mario bastardized on screen.

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Now, 30 years later, Universal has given us a vibrant, eye-popping animated adventure featuring our favorite characters from the Mario universe: Luigi, Princess Peach, Bowser, Donkey Kong, and, of course, Mario. As we filed into theaters to behold the attempted recompense for the torture of '93, we had to ask: since nothing could be worse than that movie, will this one be a delight solely because it isn’t that hunk of garbage and has Mario? Maybe.

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As we left, we asked another question: did we just watch 90 minutes of mindless nostalgia shamelessly exploited to make enormous profits at the expense of all else?

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Yes, yes we did.

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It isn’t a cynical perspective: nostalgia is beautiful, provided it doesn't become all-consuming. We should recall the good old days, reflect on the lessons learned, long for that sweeter something we’ve lost, and relish the warmth of simpler times.

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Why?

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It’s how we grow. When troubled, we know things will improve because we’ve seen better times. Even if the thought rests in our subconscious, the essence of it still influences.

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So as we sit in the theater taking in the vibrant sight of Rainbow Road, the luminescence of the coveted rainbow star, the fiery wrath of Bowser, and the endless parade of callbacks to the video games we loved as children, we feel one with ourselves in a way only childhood memories can allow. No wrong can come from that, and for plenty, that is enough to make for a great movie, and in that, there is also no wrong.

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However, it is just as legitimate to think, “Man, I would have had way more fun staying home and playing Mario Party.”

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Recreation on a big screen, particularly of old games, offers the opportunity to absorb the experience like never before. The colors pop more, the faces capture the moment, and everything is more immersive. Sadly, that novelty can only do so much, so The Super Mario Bros. Movie suffers as we realize we'd have more fun dusting off the old N64 and going a few rounds on Bowser’s Magma Mountain.

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After all, if nostalgia is the goal, what better way to experience it than by recreating the actual experience? Why sit in a theater and watch someone else’s vision of what it meant to live what you lived? Will a 90-minute advertisement capture the humiliation of raising the wrong flag in “Shy Guy Says?” Can a trip down the pipe match the joy of slowly realizing you sent the treasure chest down the right part of the maze? Can a cheesy musical number match our elation at humming along as we step on the blue star?

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No, so what’s the point?

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We’ve seen movies tap into our nostalgia to great success, between the supersonic thrills of Top Gun: Maverick and this year’s Dungeons and Dragons movie, but both possess what The Super Mario Bros. Movie lacks: effort.

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Tom Cruise threw everything he had into giving audiences a theater experience they’d never had before and may never have again. Dungeons and Dragons feels like the best thing that’s ever happened to the people behind the scenes; if they aren’t all ardent fans of the game, they faked it marvelously. It feels like there’s more, a greater ambition getting realized, or at least a desire to not rest on their laurels and bank on our appreciation for the source material to carry the day.

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The Super Mario Bros. Movie has no such ambition.

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It’s a 90-minute movie with no story. It feels like a hundred levels of the video games short-circuited to create a skeleton of a narrative. Mario and Luigi stumble into a wondrous new world; Bowser wants Peach, who teams with the brothers to stop him… sorta, cause Luigi is gone, and Toad is there being somewhat helpful, and the star is a wedding present.

The End.

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What more needs to get said? If your movie imagines its characters thinly, develops itself sparsely, and has no desire but evoking memories, then we’re bound to leave the theater wondering why we invested. Sure, the visuals provide a welcome experience for anyone who likes seeing childhood favorites brought to cinematic life, and seeing an iconic institution on the big screen is enticing, but we need more. We’ve seen such things turned into true movie magic; there’s no excuse for being this lazy, relying on us to give the movie meaning and value.

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Will it continue busting the box office? Absolutely. Will “Peaches,” the song Bowser belts over his piano as he envisions a life with the titular princess, rise up the Billboard Hot 100 and eventually score an Oscar nomination? Perhaps. Will the movie ever be more than a momentary pleasure that fades from the memory as quickly as its exploitation of nostalgia allowed it to surge into the consciousness? No.

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Is that bad? It depends. The box office receipts will show many satisfied (and returning) customers who want precisely what they got. Doubtless, many will deem it empty and hollow, a cynical profit ploy that could've been much more. As the burst of memory, it’s a mediocre effort at justifying throwing down $30 on a trip to the theater instead of staying in and playing the games. As a cash grab with zero willingness to embrace the colorful mania of Mario, it’s successful.

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For this writer, it’s just a thing that exists without much interest, creativity, or flair and should go away as swiftly as it arrived, preferably down a green pipe and into the mouth of a potted piranha plant.