Brooklyn. Mario and Luigi just opened up a plumbing service, but their father disapproves. During a giant flooding on the street, they get sucked into a portal to another dimension, where Luigi is captured by the dictator Bowser Koopa who wants to invade and annex the Mushroom Kingdom, where Mario landed and took refuge under Princess Peach who wants to save her Kingdom. Peach, Mario and Toad are joined by gorilla Donkey Kong and his army to battle Bowser. When Peach interrupts her own forced wedding with Bowser, the battle spills over to Brooklyn, where Mario and Luigi get a Star super-power and defeat Bowser and his army.
30 years after the first rejected movie adaptation of the Super Mario Bros., the directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic easily 'broke the curse' and achieved a huge success at the box office with this animated edition which is more faithful to the video games, at times even too much, to the extent that it becomes a detriment to the narrative. Overall, though, it is a fun and better movie version that has just enough charm and wit to sway the viewers into its favor. The opening act—as Bowser Koopa rhetorically asks: "And now no one can stop me!", we cut to a TV commercial of Mario's and Luigi's plumbing service, in tune to the song from "The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!", where a confused actress playing the customer says a wacky line ("Thank you Super Mario Bros.! It seems the only thing you haven't drained is my bank account") and the plumbers speak with exaggerated Italian accents, only to go even a level further as Mario and Luigi watch said commercial, speak in normal English and wonder if the accent was "too much", while a protoversion of Mario, a man in red overalls, blue shirt and a red cap says it's perfect and jumps—is so contagiously fun and sympathetic it makes you giggle like a little kid.
There are also other neat details in this first third: the grumpy Spike throws a used napkin at Luigi's face, but Mario intercepts it by catching it with his hand and throws it back at Spike; when Mario first encounters Princess Peach in the castle, he is running towards her in slow motion, reaching out his hand towards her, but her first reaction is to grab and throw him behind her back on the floor. Peach is also a well developed character, feisty and funny, already in the scene where she explains Bowser to Mario: "This guy's a lunatic, a psy-cho". Unfortunately, the whole middle part crumbles under the pressure of expected 'fan service', since there is a 30-minute part consisting out of sequences questionable to the usefulness to the narrative, which are only there to serve as a giant 'empty walk' and promotion or references to other Mario video games (the pointless long fight between Mario and Donkey Kong; the prolonged, stale Mario kart race on the rainbow highway; the dead end sequence of Mario and Donkey Kong inside the stomach of a giant fish) which seem to stop the movie and take you out of the experience, disrupting the storyline all until it reconnects again in the finale. Even the jokes stop in this central part. The first and the third act work, but the second, middle part doesn't. It is also a pity that Luigi is absent for the majority of the story, and is thus underused. Moreover, the character of Donkey Kong is superfluous to the plot. The super-powers are finally introduced, but very sparsely, and don't get to a good use all until the finale. Despite omissions and uneven parts, "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" is an overall good film with some bits of charm that remind of Pixar's better days, yet the "Super Mario Bros. 3" highlight episodes "7 Continents for 7 Koopas", "Reign Storm" and "Super Koopa" are still an unreached ideal for it.
Grade:++
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