FMovies or TV shows based on games don’t have to be terrible, as Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves and The Last of Us prove. Even The Angry Birds Movie wasn’t too bad. The trick is often to make it look like the game is based on the movie, rather than the other way around. But this much-followed and hyped new animated film is tedious and flat in every way, a disappointment to match the live-action version in 1993. It’s visually bland in ways that reminded me of European animation knockoffs and completely inert. in narrative terms. , with a bewildering lack of appropriately funny lines.
Of course, it’s based on the global gaming phenomenon, born in the 1980s, from Kyoto-based gaming giant Nintendo, with its wacky take on Italian-American plumbers Mario and Luigi. They are called Super Mario Bros, although “Mario” is not their last name, like Dostoevsky inventing a video game called The Dimitri Brothers. This film revives the ancient and surreal quest undertaken by Mario (voiced by Chris Pratt) and his brother Luigi (Charlie Day), Brooklyn plumbers who only do the silly and almost offensive Italian cod voice for their cheesy ad. television.
They find themselves transported to an undreamed of other Oz-like world through the sewers of New York; In the Mushroom Kingdom, Mario must bravely rescue Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) from the evil, fire-breathing turtle Bowser (Jack Black), who has captured Luigi and intends to make Peach his bride. . The princess and Mario must enlist the help of Donkey Kong (Seth Rogen) and Kong’s army.
In the beginning, there are some crazy and ingenious 2D obstacle sequences that move to the right and blend into the action of the game, as if by accident, but once the brothers leave the planet Earth, the dimension of the game must be repeatedly, cumbersome and boring. . And unlike the brilliant Lego movies, there’s a fierce insistence on not being ironic, funny, or self-referential about any of this—strange, since screenwriter Matthew Fogel worked on The Lego Movie 2. Arguably the only exception is when Bowser is seen pensively playing power ballads on his piano. Even Super Mario superfans may prefer the game.
