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My children aren’t small anymore. This being the case my years of taking them to see whatever mediocre kids film was on release for the holidays are behind me. I look back on having to sit through various forgettable animations like Open Season, Hoodwinked, Surfs Up, Shark Tale, The Secret Life of Pets, Pooh’s Heffalump Movie and Rio 1 and 2 with fondness but no great sense of loss. These family film going experiences were instrumental in developing in my daughters the love of going to the cinema that they now have and I am sure we would not all be rushing off to each new Marvel movie together today otherwise, but jeez a lot of those films were tedious.

Still though, I felt a certain level of nostalgia when my eldest teenager asked if I wanted to go and see The Super Mario Bros. Movie. I didn’t but she did so off we went. I think seeing this for her is like me wanting to watch something based on the Action Force toys when I was her age; that’s what I used to play and this is what she used to play. The difference being of course that she is still able to engage in her activity because computer games are fun at any age. In fact she spent some time with Mario, Luigi, Toad et al on the Nintendo Switch before we went out but I had definitely packed Baron Iron Blood and the Z Force Captain away by the time I was her age.

Sidebar: Mario Bros. was also a thing when I was a kid of course, but the game play on the ZX Spectrum or the Game & Watch was a very different thing. Also, 2009’s G.I Joe: The Rise of Cobra was based on a version of Action Force but I was 36 by then and too busy taking my kids to see King Fu Pandas and Ice Ages, which I could happily have added to the previous list.

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Anyway, cascades of fond reminisces aside, The Super Mario Bros. Movie is fine. It isn’t as bad as the worst of those early 2000s CGI brain numbers but neither was it anything more than a standard kids flick. The film has been the subject of expectation and debate since it was announced with some wanting it to be a knowing Lego Movie style post modern parable and others bemoaning the lack of authentic Mario Italian voices. It has neither of these elements, which is particularly good news in relation to the latter because there is nothing authentically Italian about those accents and when they reference this it only serves to show how wise they were to avoid it. In fact, I know the brand recognition is key to this film but seeing Mario and his sibling up on the big screen for ninety minutes does highlight what an odd design those characters are. No one would create a hero looking like this if the movie was made from scratch; seeing him next to the more typical looking Princess Peach is like casting Fred Flintstone opposite Motoko Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell.

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The narrative as it stands is just there to string the chase and action sequences together but these are fun enough, if inevitably like watching someone else play a computer game. Still it is bright and it is colourful and it has just the right amount of wit. Bad guy Bowser is given a motivation that I don’t believe was ever stated in the games but it kind of works and there is some attempt to create a mystery around Peach’s origins that I am sure will be picked up in the sequel.

I don’t imagine that I’ll be watching that sequel though. My daughter enjoyed the movie but I don’t think she feels any need to revisit it either. (She enjoyed it more for knowing the source material better.) For now though, this was a nice trip to the movies just like those ones we enjoyed in the past.

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The Ripley Factor:

Princess Peach is nothing more than the damsel that needs rescuing in most of the Super Mario Bros. console games, at least from what I know of them, but she has a bit more to her when she is a playable character in Mario Kart and the Mario and Sonic at the Olympics games. This is built on here by making Peach a very capable hero in her own right but of course she still needs the diminutive plumber to save her in the end. There’s apparently no time in the story to explain why she sees him as her hero but actually the film is more interested in the bond between the brothers. To be fair it’s hard to deny that the title actually demands all of this. Whatever, I had a great night out with a different inspirational young woman.

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