I'm sorry to report the Super Mario Brothers Movie just isn't that good.

Definitely not $1 billion good

I saw the Mario movie this week. Everyone was relentlessly hyping it up, including some people whose opinions I respect a great deal, so I figured it was worth a shot. Of note: I went with two of my children (with whom I’ve played the older Mario games and who are thus somewhat well-versed in the game’s mythology). This is I think the only acceptable conditions under which a grown man should see a video game cartoon movie. Demographic returns indicate that this movie’s billion-dollar box office take is being driven heavily by grown adults, most of them men. There’s such a depressing sort of desperation to that. I can vouch that in the sparsely populated matinee which we attended, mine were the only children in attendance. Everyone else was a grown adult.

So: The movie. It’s pretty lame. It’s not hideously bad. It has its clever moments. Chris Pratt’s Mario and Charlie Day’s Luigi are actually pretty good voice renditions. The rest of the voice actors are the usual lineup of A- and B-list celebrities that always seem to make it into these animated movies. Seth Rogen played Donkey Kong and he was sort of funny in that role, for a bit. But overall I’m getting tired of this relentless lineup of animated movies that are just excuses for Millennials and GenXers to say: “Hey! I recognize that voice, that’s so-and-so!” It’s lame.

The Mario movie is lame too. To be fair it starts out promisingly enough: Mario and Luigi are plumbers in Brooklyn trying to make their way in the competitive New York plumbing market. The movie opens with a low-budget commercial that the brothers claim to have spent their entire life savings producing. Hilariously, the commercial is a rendition of the theme song to the Super Mario Bros. Super Show, the ill-fated TV series starring the late Captain Lou Albano. I thought that was a deft bit of nostalgic callback in a movie that was otherwise saturated with pretty tiresome nostalgic callbacks.

The first five minutes made me think the movie might have some chops. But ultimately the story is empty, without consequence. The brothers get sucked into the iconic Mushroom Kingdom via an inexplicable pipe located deep underneath the New York City streets. There’s no explanation for how the pipe got there, no pretense at an explanation, and the discovery of this pipe is so serendipitous that you’d think the screenwriters were working on a twelve-minute deadline and just had to get something out the door.

The action commences after Mario and Luigi arrive in this odd alternate dimension; Bowser shows up; there’s lots of action; there are powerups and Pirhanna Flowers and a Bullet Bill. It will not surprise you to know it is basically just the Mario video games, rendered in a sort of lazy bare-bones narrative format. Every scene is largely just an excuse to plug some Mario meme from years or decades past. They could’ve done this in a way that was gratifying both sentimentally and artistically, but they just went for the former at the total expense of the latter. The dialogue was rushed and unstudied. The humor was 99% that sort of lame, flat, airless deadpan-style stuff that Millennials and GenZers seem to like so much:

(A well-dressed Kong monkey opens up the door and waves the characters inside)

Toad: That…was a gorilla in a sports coat.

Of course, Peach is a girl-boss, a sort of hyper-competent Amazonian-style warrior-princess. I mean, yes, it’s true she’s been rendered that way in several Nintendo games, including Mario 2 and the Super Smash Bros. series. But you can tell what they’re going for here. Nobody just does a thing anymore. The filmmakers didn’t lay it on as thick as they could, you got to give them credit for that, but it’s hard to miss it. Mario’s and Luigi’s own arcs from clumsy, struggling plumbers to kingdom-saving Italian heroes is, you know, it’s okay, sort of. It’s not really much of anything. Mario has daddy issues; so does Donkey Kong. Was any of this necessary? A primate character named “Donkey Kong” moping around about his dad?

This movie was nowhere near the frenetic level of hype that’s been built up around it. That’s not to say I didn’t have fun. I did, because my kids enjoyed it a lot, and that really goes a long way in helping a parent enjoy something. We don’t let them watch just anything, we avoid all forms of poisonous woke garbage as well as the weird creepy empty streaming/social media franchises that like 95% of kids are addicted to these days. But this movie was harmless so it was nice to see them laughing and hollering throughout it, especially the great comedic battle sequence at the end when they were just pealing with laughter and pumping their fists. It was also their first time ever going to a movie theater so it was nice to experience that peculiar sort of magic for the first time, through them.

So it was a wash. I mean I guess it was a little more than a wash, since I had a good time with my kids doing a special thing. That’s generally a net positive. But the movie was not a net positive. At best the movie was just a movie—just another entry in the unceasing train of “content” that now dominates the cinema, another placeholder for another set of trademarked properties meant to make a bunch of money and do nothing else. Oh, well. With the success of this movie you can guarantee they’re going make a minimum of 55 more of them, so doubtlessly we’ll have the chance to go over this again next year.