The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023)
Pretty much as I expected. A very fast paced colorful movie with a plethora of gamey elements.
First of all, the animation was amazing. Full of detail and a nice balance between game graphics and a sense of realism. The humour wasn’t bad and I liked how they tried to create some sort of sense for all the gamey elements in its fantasy world. The gamey scenes worked well enough but the actual story felt like mostly filler to get to the gamey references. Like in Doom with that one cool POV scene and the rest was meh. Without the Mario world, this would have been a very bland movie.
I didn’t expect Pixar level of depth, but at least hoped for something a bit more than decent game scenes glued together by a mediocre story.
I saw this with my daughter and she seemed decently entertained, though I could see she also got a bit lost in the fast moving plot. I noticed that most of the laughs in the theater came from the adults. The target group for this is clearly adults who played Mario games as a kid and now have their own kids and this a perfect excuse to see something together. Just like myself.
Rating: 3