Joel on Film

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie does technically fulfill the promise of what a sequel should do, by building a bit on the world of the first film and going bigger with its scope and scale. It doesn’t mean much, though, for a movie that still falls into the avoidable traps of 2023’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which sacrificed genuine inventiveness in favor of bland nostalgia. Once again, the animation style here is detailed but not anything particularly special, mostly due to likely studio mandates that were utterly and fatally risk-averse.

The job of directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic there was to give us exactly what we might have expected from a movie about the sibling plumbers, whose excursion into a fantasy world in the first movie brought them into the vicinity of a bunch of other recognizable characters and backdrops. The directors, with this sequel, have clearly been tasked with giving us even more characters, set against even more elaborate backdrops, but even though this is technically “more” in the sense of a big-budgeted sequel, it’s also mostly just more of the same. Neither Mario (voice of Chris Pratt) nor Luigi (voice of Charlie Day) was an actual character with a personality that went beyond what was established in Nintendo’s wildly popular video games, and that’s maybe even truer here.

All they manage to be this time are vessels for another visually busy and conceptually shallow plot that only hints at anything akin to “depth” or even story detail. It’s not even all that clear where Matthew Fogel’s screenplay picks up with these two in relation to the end of the last story, relegating the brothers to passive observers of the plot in their own movie for so long that, once again, the finale builds up to a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it showdown in which they team up to defeat a common enemy. One supposes there could be a mild sign of relief that the two aren’t separated for the length of the movie this time around.

This isn’t to say the film is a total loss. Some flashes of invention and creativity arrive in the form of one arrival to a lavish casino in which gravity is relative to whichever ground one is standing on—be it the floor, any of the four walls, or the ceiling—and some excursions that adopt the visual stratagem of the games (i.e. following from the side as they move through an obstacle course toward a specific goal) are pretty neat. The movie’s re-introduction to Bowser (voice of Jack Black), still in a state of defeat after the first film, is genuinely hilarious, as the once-towering king of the Koopas is now tiny and imprisoned in a miniature castle—though, he insists by way of random bursts of anger, fully rehabilitated of his villainy.

The callbacks, however, overwhelm nearly everything else here, existing entirely to tease a probably bigger event in some future movie (which, the studio undoubtedly hopes, will be a smash—hint, hint). It’s not just the surprise characters who show up here, to include a Yoshi (voiced by Donald Glover) who is an adorable doofus or a certain orange canine who flies a really cool ship. It’s also the fact that basically nothing is resolved by the end, even with this film’s eventual villain, so that a future film pretty much has to be made (the mid-credits sequence confirms this by introducing yet another character to populate that future sequel).

There are hints within of a movie to be taken more seriously: Bowser Jr. (voice of Benny Safdie) schemes to free his father from imprisonment, and dear old dad sort of has to confront his old parenting techniques. Princess Peach (voice of Anya Taylor-Joy) is still searching for some clues about her origin and past, while juggling her role as ruler of the Mushroom Kingdom. Another new character is introduced in the form of Rosalina (voice of Brie Larson), a princess from a far-off realm whom Bowser Jr. kidnaps for nefarious purposes.

It’s all at the service of flash and pizzazz that barely stops long enough to allow breath, as our intrepid-but-dull heroes have to band together to stop a weapon of mass destruction and, maybe, try to get through to their old nemesis. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie at least isn’t a step down from its predecessor, but at some point, one has to assume the powers-that-be will realize they’ve misplaced what makes an animated adventure truly special when it’s firing on all cylinders.

Rating: ** (out of ****)