Pushing Buttons: The Super Mario Bros Movie is just fine – but what else did you expect?

Pushing Buttons: The Super Mario Bros Movie is just fine – but what else did you expect?

In this week’s newsletter: After decades of offensively terrible video game adaptations, I’m more than happy to settle for one that is simply OK

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I don’t think I’ve ever been to see a film on its opening day – but I made the effort for the Super Mario Bros Movie last week. Using my six-year-old as a convenient excuse to see a children’s movie in the middle of the day, I sat in a suspiciously quiet cinema and tried to keep a handle on my trepidation. The reviews had come out the day before, and they weren’t good. I anticipated spending the next 90 minutes feeling bitterly disappointed that, yet again, Hollywood had screwed up a golden opportunity to bring a beloved game to the big screen.

Perhaps my expectations were just exceedingly low – I have, after all, suffered through 30 years of offensively terrible movie adaptations of video games, with only the occasional reprieve – but I thought it was fine. It’s not as surreal and funny as Detective Pikachu, nor as creative as the video-game-inspired Wreck-it Ralph or Free Guy, but it looked right, sounded right, and didn’t labour the nostalgia too much. Plenty of critics have characterised the film as a lazy and meaningless sequence of empty references – and, yes, it suffers from a distinct absence of plot – but how much narrative justification do we actually need for a trip down Rainbow Road in go-karts? (Side note: a Mad Max/Mario Kart mashup road battle was not something I was expecting from this film.)

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