When the trailer came out for the “Super Mario Bros.” movie, fans of the game were excited. In the movie released earlier this month, the video game translated well to film because the worlds and characters were familiar to audiences, while also different from typical Mario games. Nintendo also worked on this movie with the animation studio Illumination.

The voice cast includes Chris Pratt, Charlie Day, Anya Taylor-Joy, Charles Martinet, Jack Black, Keegan Michael Key, Fred Armisen, Sebastain Maniscalco, Kevin Michael Richardson, Khary Peyton, Eric Bauza and Jessica Dicicco. The voice cast was great, even Chris Pratt, whom everyone thought would be terrible. Pratt had an Italian accent briefly during the start of the film but veered off into a non-accented voice which was surprisingly well done.

Princess Peach and Luigi switched the roles they usually have in Super Mario games. Luigi was the one who got captured by Bowser and Peach went with Mario to save his brother. Based on the trailer, I knew Princess Peach was going to be tough, but she was still tougher than I expected.

Toad went with Mario and Peach to save Luigi and I thought he was going to be an annoying comic relief character. He wasn’t. In fact, he showed his excitement for going on an adventure once or twice and remained quiet while with them. Toad did have some brief comedic moments.

The world building was incredible. Each world looked like it was straight from the video game. However, they should’ve also gone more into greater depth with the other worlds. The main worlds shown were Bowser’s Kingdom, Kong Kingdom and Mushroom Kingdom. But since it’s a Mario movie, it would have been great if the film spent more time in the other worlds, such as Ice World and Yoshi’s Island.

There were references to other video games such as the original Donkey Kong Game, 3D World and MarioKart. They were subtle and didn’t feel like product placement.

The ending was also not completely predictable because Mario and Princess Peach did not end up together, though he did stay in the Mushroom Kingdom.

Yoshi should have had a bigger role considering his prominence in earlier games. The luma that was accepting death added some dark humor to this film. When the other characters were trapped in cages the luma was talking about the “sweet release of death” and at the climax of the film, the luma, which is a star with eyes, was cheering when the cages were being lowered into lava. Overall, this movie felt like watching an extended cut scene in the best way possible.

8.5/10 kernels

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