Review of The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023) by Drakor — 09 Jun 2023

While this movie is a fun time and the references are cool if you turn your brain off, if you want plot, character depth or any of the other things that made movies like Aladdin or the lion king interesting look elsewhere, this movie is a shallow advertisement with all the character development of a sports game, peach is improved from her game counterpart but that's a low bar, as is everything else about the characters, bowser is a simp who's interesting in the first scene he's shown in and nowhere else he's not threatening, and not cool, he's stupid and comic relief most of the time, the top quality animation does little to distract from the stupid licensed songs that have no right to be there, the voices of bowser toad and Luigi are good, but peaches voice feels out of place but still good enough and Mario's voice is awful, the pacing is all out of whack and with the run time the entire half of the movie spent getting the Kong army is rendered pointless by an explosion dropping them into the sea, Luigi miraculously stops being afraid the second Mario drops in instead of shining some light on a character arc,.

Not a single character in the movie has an arc, they're only slightly less static than their game counterparts, I didn't expect Aladdin level story, but I did expect at least characters with more depth than cardboard.