Peter Howell: Wahoo! A “Super Mario Bros.” movie finally gets the game right

Game-based shows are having a “Wahoo!” cultural moment: “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” currently tops the box office, “The Last of Us” was a recent TV smash and “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” is poised to open in 4,000 North American theatres with ticket sales exceeding $125 million.

This couldn’t come a second too soon for the Super Mario franchise, Nintendo’s flagship amusement, which 30 years ago had the misfortune of launching the video-game-to-big-screen genre with the absolute garbage that was “Super Mario Bros.”

That 1993 live-action film starred Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo as excitable Brooklyn plumbing brothers Mario and Luigi. They were dragged down a sewer into a parallel universe, a dank underworld called Dinohattan where dinosaurs evolved into lizardlike humanoids, led by evil King Koopa, played by an extremely bored Dennis Hopper. An exiled princess (Samantha Mathis) teamed with the Mario Bros. to foil Koopa’s global domination plot.

Clumsily directed by Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton, and as dull on the eyes as it was deadening to the brain, the film made the cardinal mistake of cherry-picking elements of the video game while forsaking others.

Fans were enraged, for example, that Luigi was depicted without the brothers’ trademark moustache. Newcomers were baffled and an embarrassed Hoskins would later tell an interviewer that it was a mistake to make a video game into a movie. He advised Super Mario fans to “keep your childhood memories alive and safely locked in your head forever” rather than risk seeing them destroyed on the big screen.

No such warning is needed for “The Super Mario Bros. Movie.”

The new film is so colourful, sweet and playful, while ultimately insubstantial, going to it is like being handed a bowl of Froot Loops cereal to munch on instead of a bag of popcorn.

Directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic, and screenwriter Matthew Fogel, seek to make amends for the 1993 film debacle. Their energetic animation, running a brisk 92 minutes, faithfully recreates most of the Nintendo game’s places, characters and moves. The latter include the “power-ups” of the Nintendo game, which allow Mario to morph into a superhero and also a cat or raccoon, just for the hell of it.

Devoted to pleasing fans while also attracting curious newbies, the filmmakers seek to woo adults by putting many celebrity voices behind the well-known characters from Super Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong, another Nintendo cash cow.

Chris Pratt is have-a-go Mario and Charlie Day is hapless Luigi, the brothers trying and failing to launch their own plumbing business. They come from a large Italian family in Brooklyn — a dinner scene spoofs a family confab from “Saturday Night Fever” — but in a rare break from Nintendo tradition, they don’t speak with the stereotypical accents of the video game. Diehard fans will soon get over their disappointment, I trust.

Once again a sewer is the gateway to adventure, but the brothers’ paths diverge. Mario lands in a colourful wonderland called the Mushroom Kingdom. It’s populated by ’shroom-headed trolls (including one called Toad, voiced by Keegan-Michael Key) and benignly ruled by the warrior Princess Peach, voiced by a buoyant Anya Taylor-Joy.

Luigi ends up in a dystopian hellscape called the Dark Lands. Mobs of stubby skeletons, resembling Peanuts characters in Halloween attire, suddenly appear and freak him out.

The Dark Lands are ruled by a giant spiked turtle named Bowser, a.k.a. King Koopa, voiced by Jack Black with evident glee. Like all villains associated with the hit-making animation studio Illumination, which also produces the “Minions” and Dr. Seuss movies, he’s neither scary nor all that dangerous. That goes double for his dopey Koopa Troop soldiers.

Bowser is infatuated with Princess Peach. He orders her to marry him or watch as he burns the Mushroom Kingdom to the ground. The aggrieved Peach prefers to fight rather than hitch. She joins forces with Mario — whose real motivation is to find and save Luigi — and her giant ape neighbour Donkey Kong (a rambunctious Seth Rogen).

That’s about it for the plot, the film’s weakest element. “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” is more of a getting-to-know-you-again immersion into Nintendo lore than a truly great adventure. Better stories would benefit the inevitable sequels.

Let’s hope Bowser remains a mainstay of the franchise. He’s the best part of the film, especially during a musical interlude in which he theatrically pounds out a love ballad to Peach on a piano, wailing like hard rocker Axl Rose of Guns N’ Roses. (Pity they didn’t get the GNR tune “November Rain” for the soundtrack.)

The scene is ridiculously dumb, but fun, like the movie it’s part of.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie

Animated adventure featuring the voices of Chris Pratt, Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Day, Jack Black, Seth Rogen, Keegan-Michael Key, Fred Armisen, Sebastian Maniscalco, Charles Martinet and Kevin Michael Richardson. Written by Matthew Fogel. Directed by Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic. Now open at theatres everywhere. 92 minutes. PG

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