The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023) September 24th, 2023

In 2014 The LEGO Movie proved a feature length commercial could trancend its original purpose as a marketing tool to become a seminal work of art. Since then I’ve held all other feature length commercials to The LEGO Movie standard. The blatently commercial The Super Mario Bros. Movie doesn’t even attempt to reach that standard.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie circumvents the challenge and boons of being a substantive film, opting for a straightforward Mario origin story instead. We learn who the Super Mario Bros. are, a fraternal plumbing business in New York. We learn there is a Mushroom Kingdom, a magical land populated by toadstool people and ruled by Princess Peach whose benevolence is matched only by her beauty. Finally we learn about Bowser, the despotic Koopa King who’s singular goal is marrying Princess Peach. We follow Mario as he masters the physics and power-ups of the Mushroom Kingdom, rescues his brother Luigi, and eventually defeats Bowser and saves the Princess. Hum six or seven pop songs from the last 30 years and I just saved you the trouble of watching this tale told by an idiot full of lights and sounds, signifying profits.

I shouldn’t be disappointed. The Super Mario Bros. Movie wasn’t for me and that’s ok. Sometimes you just need a meaningless adventure story that pushes all your comfort buttons and risks nothing. Few animated films can compare with The LEGO Movie, Rango, or Up! and maybe it’s unfair to hold them all to that standard. But I can’t resign myself to giving up hope that they could.

What’s worse than The Super Mario Bros. Movie being the film equivelant of rectal sloughing is knowing in 20 years I’m going to be subjected to snot-nosed kids insisting it was a classic from the start. Rest assured it will happen, its already happened with the Star Wars prequels, it’ll happen with the most recent Star Wars trilogy too. Eventually Disney will host a big one-hour special where young fans queue in convention halls for the privilege of dousing Daisy Ridley in praise for her brave performance as Naked Corpse… sorry… wrong role… as Rey Nobody-Palpatine-Skywalker. This is the inevitable fate of The Super Mario Bros. Movie.

Unless… maybe there’s hope just yet. Maybe… the youth of 2043 will have already given up speaking as their primary mode of communication, electing instead to have their undeveloped minds uploaded to a cloud where they can stagnate in an unevolving cloudbased server for the low low price of their bodily autonomy. While their conciousness is busy instantaniously pinging between the most popular future version of Fruit Ninja and whatever passes for pornography, their bodies are subjected to an unlimited variety of experimentations by corporate conglomorates for anti-aging drugs sold to the remaining population reluctant to go full-cyborg. This next generation could be the first to fulfill the teenage dream, to exist in a world without adults, responsibilities, or inconveniences. A world where you never grow up. This bittersweet utopia where all the surviving old people will be the first generation unbothered by upstart youngsters causing trouble in the real world, they’ll also be the first generation without grandchildren or hope for the future.

But at least none of them will tell me they liked The Super Mario Bros. Movie.