The Mario series has some of the most recognizable music cues in gaming history, and Tyler deploys many of them throughout the action just where you hope they’d drop. Brian Tyler’s bombastic score takes care of the musical side of this equation, perfectly expressing the grandeur and whimsy of the games’ tracks at every turn and mining Koji Kondo’s original orchestrations to great effect. Bowser’s fire-versus-ice siege of the Penguin Kingdom, the expansive fungi vistas of the Mushroom Kingdom, and the lush greenery of the Kongs’ Jungle Kingdom are all super-saturated dreamscapes that coalesce into a bustling world begging to be explored further. Movie’s visual vibrance sets a very high bar for the other animated video game adaptations which will surely follow, be that from Nintendo or another studio. Once you’ve already bought in to things like that, giving 10 minutes of the movie up to staging a big-budget Mario Kart race so that a trek from A to B feels a little more lively is an easier pill to swallow.
The movie trusts its audience isn’t going to care much about why platforms float, or why there are blocks with question marks all over the place full of power-ups that turn people into cats and flamethrowers.
At worst, sequences like the Rainbow Road race can feel a bit tacked on when they don’t fully make the case for being there with any kind of logical reason (being able to sell movie-branded Mario Kart toys doesn’t count), but then logic is not a currency anyone’s expecting The Super Mario Bros. Movie’s heavy use of references isn’t a good thing in and of itself, but their inclusion feels justified because they are used in ways that feel relevant and organic to the world. Movie manages a great balance of accessibility for general audiences and inside jokes for those of us who’ve dipped in and out of the series over the years. Movie almost always has an inventive in-world solution to whatever problem pops up that relies on something easily recognizable from the games, but never withholds explanation of how that thing works (even if the why goes rightfully ignored.) Whether it’s recreating the path of World 1-1 as Mario and Luigi parkour their way through Brooklyn or the pre-emptive giggle fans will get seeing Mario ingest a blue mushroom instead of a red one during a fight, The Super Mario Bros.
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