The Super Mario Galaxy Movie made a billion dollars, and Nintendo's most recent earnings report credits it with helping more than double the company's IP-related income. Both numbers belong in a review of it, because this is a film engineered to be recognised rather than discovered.
The plot is a rescue. Bowser Jr. (Benny Safdie) abducts Princess Rosalina (Brie Larson), mother to a race of star-children called Lumas, and Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) goes after her, with Mario (Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day) following into orbit behind her. It is bright, it is funny, and almost everything in it is something you have seen before.
What games does the movie actually pull from?
Galaxy is the title, but the sourcing runs the whole franchise and favours the odd corners. Peach and Toad (Keegan-Michael Key) chase a thief into an underground city called the Minus World, named for a glitch — the one in Super Mario Bros. that stranded players in an underwater level they could never finish. The casino down there belongs to Wart (Luis Guzmán), villain of Super Mario Bros. 2, a game so famously not-quite-Mario that it began life as something else entirely.
That is the film's real instinct. Not a greatest-hits reel but the franchise's junk drawer, tipped out and arranged: Fire Bars from 1985, a desert town lifted from Odyssey, and R.O.B., the 1985 console accessory, now staffing a spaceport.
Come to it cold and you still get a handsome, fast adventure. Come to it warm and you get another forty small pleasures stacked on top. What the film never quite manages is generating that warmth itself. It spends the warmth you walked in with.
A kid building a level for his dad
At one point Bowser Jr. drops Mario and Peach into a gauntlet that runs on a two-dimensional interface, sprites and all. It plays like a Super Mario Maker stage, with the villain cast as designer rather than player.
That is the one genuinely good idea in the film.
Because Junior is not only building a trap. He is building something to show his father, which is precisely what Mario Maker is for — make a stage, share it, wait to be told it is good. Bowser (Jack Black), shrunk and jailed at the end of the last film, spends this one watching the fruit of everything he planted come up.
Nobody pushes it much further than that. But it is there, and it puts something underneath a film that would otherwise be all surface.
The brothers, and the one scene worth the ticket
Turned briefly into infants, Mario and Luigi get a wordless stretch of physical comedy that is the best thing here. Mario picks up a mallet, plays a T-Rex's teeth like a keyboard, and a familiar Mario tune comes out of them.
It works because the film is thinking in the games' grammar rather than pointing at their contents. Hostile geometry becomes an instrument, which is what a Mario level has always been.
It is also a digression that changes nothing, and there is the structural problem. The film is a run of missions, not a plot — each sequence sealed off, almost nothing carried forward. The exception is a parasol Mario gives Peach for her birthday, which keeps coming back and earns its return every time.
How bright is too bright?
Visually it is relentless. Saturated, luminous, never resting, and at home you may genuinely want the brightness turned down, which is the most specific thing there is to say about how it looks. A day later, none of it stays.
For a film selling spectacle, that is not a small note. Impressive and unmemorable are allowed to be the same thing.
Three out of five, and a GLOWING one: a worthy night in, doing precisely the job it was built to do. The earnings report suggests it did that job extremely well. It has been on Peacock since 30 July, and the sofa suits it — this is a film to have on, not to make plans around.
Bowser's fall. Mario cuts the bridge and drops him into the lava, and the film lets you believe it for a beat before bringing him back as Dry Bones Bowser. Nothing here is permitted to land with any real weight, and this is where that becomes obvious.
Mario saves Bowser Jr. Exactly the move a film like this makes, at exactly the moment it has to make it.
The prison. Both Bowsers end up locked up, and the film pointedly declines to reform either of them. After ninety minutes of being agreeable, refusing the redemption is the sharpest choice it makes.
Peach and Rosalina. The two turn out to be sisters, and the reveal hands Peach the origin she has been missing all film. It is the emotional centre the whole thing has been building toward, and it arrives exactly on schedule.
Planet Bowser. The sisters turn the war planet green. Tidy, pretty, and about as complicated as that sounds.
Stay for the credits. Princess Daisy turns up, stopping the same thief Peach and Toad chased earlier. No spin-off has been announced, but the groundwork is unmistakable.
Bright Bulbs
- Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) takes on Wart's entire crew alone in the casino, and finally gets an action sequence the film builds around her.
- Bowser (Jack Black) and his son get the film's warmest scenes, and their material together lands more consistently than the rescue plot does.
Dull Bulbs
- Everything functions and nothing surprises. Competent, pleasant, and content to stop exactly there.
Cast
- Chris Pratt as Mario
- Anya Taylor-Joy as Princess Peach
- Charlie Day as Luigi
- Jack Black as Bowser
- Keegan-Michael Key as Toad
- Benny Safdie as Bowser Jr.
- Brie Larson as Princess Rosalina
- Donald Glover as Yoshi
- Glen Powell as Fox McCloud
- Luis Guzmán as Wart
- Issa Rae as Honey Queen
- Kevin Michael Richardson as Kamek