Hollywood has turned its back on specialised voice actors, and animations like these are all the poorer for it.Ĭhris Pratt and Anya Taylor-Joy voice Mario and Princess Peach in ‘The Super Mario Bros Movie' (Universal)Īlready, there has emerged a perceived divide between “critics” (snobbish untrustworthy fun-hating) and “fans” (honest receptive fun-embracing). Others – Anya Taylor-Joy’s Princess Peach Seth Rogen’s Donkey Kong – are insipid. As Luigi, Charlie Day is more or less doing Charlie Day. Keegan-Michael Key gives a passable turn as the skin-scratchingly annoying Toad. Jack Black gives bluster and strains for baritone as the villainous Bowser, but never quite lands on a consistent voice. (This was an inevitability, really: the game’s Mario was always too one-note to ever make it to the screen without titivation.) Though Pratt has rightly faced criticism for his anaemic vocal performance, the truth is that most of the other cast members are similarly lacking. Perhaps the biggest departure from the games is the casting of Chris Pratt as the titular plumber, replacing Charles Martinet’s inimitable Italianised yelps with a more conventional American clip. The whole thing plays out like a feature-length advertisement: to really hammer the point home, screenings were immediately preceded by a bombastic post-trailers ad for the Nintendo Switch and its range of Mario games. The emotional throughlines are threadbare, the dialogue pathetic. Its plot, which flits between story beats with an attention-deficient abruptness, is utterly without heft. Once you stop recognising things and start actually watching, it’s clear there are myriad problems with The Super Mario Bros Movie. All of this ensures that The Super Mario Brothers Movie is a world apart from Super Mario Bros ’93. But in the modern age of nerd culture supremacy, “Easter eggs” such as this are all too often used and accepted as currency. Does this augment the film in any substantive way? Obviously not. Those with enough familiarity will be able to pick up on, say, the menu score from Mario Kart 8 being interpolated into the soundtrack when Mario and co are preparing to drive. For its efforts, the film is absolutely packed with things that gamers will recognise – characters, items, music cues, etc. Though it’s transparently aimed at young kids, it devotes a lot of energy catering to the nostalgia of older gamers the screening I doggedly attended (admittedly, an early evening one on opening night in central London) more childless adults than children. Unlike the botched 1993 version, the new Mario is animated, with the characters and environments rendered in painstakingly faithful imitation of the source material. Filmmaking, though, has never been about ticking boxes. The Super Mario Brothers Movie – a co-production between Illumination studio and Nintendo themselves – knows intimately what it is gamers are looking for in a Mario film, and it provides it in spades. What these films all have in common is an abject failure to reproduce what it is people found so fun about the games in the first place. Whether we’re talking zany action films (1995’s Mortal Kombat), grimy horrors (2004’s Resident Evil: Apocalypse), third-rate fantasies (2010’s Prince of Persia) or… whatever the hell Assassin’s Creed (2017) was, video games have inspired a host of the worst Hollywood films in recent memory. In many ways, the new children’s feature, released in cinemas this week, is the antithesis not just of the 1993 version, but of every shoddy video-game adaptation that trudged in its footsteps. But this time The Super Mario Brothers Movie suffers from the opposite problem: it understands video games far, far too well. Thirty years later and the Mario games have been adapted again. Hoskins was oblivious to the film’s origins until he’d already signed on, and who could blame him? Even if he had played the games, the murky, off-putting crime fantasy was unrecognisable from the eye-poppingly colourful frivolity that inspired it. Hollywood simply didn’t understand video games. The film – a loose adaptation of Nintendo’s hit platforming franchise, starring Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo – came to epitomise the “curse” of sub-par game-to-screen adaptations for decades. Mamma mia: Mario (Chris Pratt) in ‘The Super Mario Bros Movie’ (Nintendo/Illumination)Īcross the history of cinematic screw-ups, few have been as notorious or lasting as 1993’s Super Mario Bros.
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