Nintendo’s favorite plumbers, in SPACE!
Directed by: Aaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic, Pierre Leduc
Written by: Matthew Fogel
Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Pratt, Jack Black, Benny Safdie, Brie Larson, Glen Powell
Swift shot: It’s a fun film that the whole family can enjoy. I suspect the kids will get more thrills out of it than their parents. But, this movie is chock full of nods and allusions to tons of Nintendo characters that you are sure to recognize and appreciate. And what is best is that your kids will be creating connections with the same characters in a colorful, imaginative, and pretty nifty space adventure!
As the film begins, Princess Rosalina (Larson) is reading to her star-babies (don’t ask) and all the little tikes want to hear about is the Plumbers and Donkey Kong, obviously. But she is interrupted and kidnapped by Bowser, Jr. (Safdie) who is hell-bent on seeking revenge and acceptance from his father, Bowser (Black).
After that we are transported to some weird Mexican landscape with little skeletons in sombreros who have called on the plumbers, Mario (Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day) to investigate something strange in their pipes. I mean, they are plumbers, no? You guessed it, it’s Yoshi!
Yoshi (Donald Glover) naturally steals every scene he’s in, I think a lot of adult critics [I am looking at you RT verified snobs] seem to forget this movie is for kids. It’s also partly for the adult kids who grew up playing Super Mario Bros. and wasted, errr, enjoyed countless hours bruising their thumbs in a futile effort to achieve greatness without the help of those cheat codes or the ultimate cheating hack those Game Genie things.
Anyway, we get a very brief but slick artistic montage of how Yoshi got there, and we are off on a new adventure. Now that Bowser, Jr. (let’s just call him Junior for the rest of the review) has a power source, his “first princess,” that he plans on draining of all her life force, i.e. KILL HER. He wants to bust his dad out of the Palace. A sort of free the princess twist, in a way!
One of the little star-kids manages to seek out Princess Peach (Taylor-Joy) and implore her to help save Rosalina. Turns out Peach never knew where she herself came from, and you guessed it, SISTER, so, Peach has a sister. Anyway, she leaves Mario and the kingdom a note and sets off to find Rosalina.
Meanwhile, Junior complicates things further by attacking the palace and Mario and Luigi to rescue his dad. And in the process he manages to snag the WHOLE palace, but he misses his dad.
They escape with Bowser, who has now regained his size, and head to the kingdom of the bees to find out how they can find Peach.
At some point, Peach and Yoshi go to a galaxy gate trying to locate Rosalina. They end up meeting more colorful characters and have a whole epic dimensional shifting chase scene in a giant pachinko machine!
Once they get out of that mess, they have to hire a pilot to rescue the princess. Sound familiar? Well, they end up hiring none other than Fox McCloud! Given the sound that came out of the woman sitting next to me, he’s pretty popular in Nintendo lore.
But, while the star fox is an amazingly brave pilot, they do get shot down by Junior who, at his dad’s request, doesn’t kill them, but uses a ray that will have them begging for their mommies. You’ll see . . .
Now the rescue team is all assembled but they are stranded on another planet and meet yet another classic Universal monster, one that has shared some screentime with Pratt, no less. [Swift aside: yes, I know it isn’t the same character, calm down, but the roar was definitely identical]
So, with Yoshi, Peach, one of the stars, Star Fox, and the brothers, they set out for their final standoff against Bowser and Junior.
Again, I can’t say this enough, it really was a fun, colorful, and imaginative film! And this is why I get bent when I hear this movie referred to as a “screensaver” and that “AI is better than this!” Bullshit!! I think whoever is saying that has it out for Chris Pratt, period. Or maybe they just forgot how to embrace their inner child, assuming the soulless nitwits ever had one. Maybe they were just born miserable.
[Swift aside: this is why I try to avoid seeing what other critics think before I write my review. The critic community will unfortunately pick their darlings and their devils. And I fear Chris Pratt is too hated for his conservative Christian values, of late, to get a fair shake with certain “respected” critics. And I am now seeing that the audience loved the movie and the critics are bashing it]
It sounds like a cliche, but my dad always said cliches become cliches because they have merit. If you enjoyed the first film, you’ll like this one, too. It really is that simple. It’s a movie for kids to check out of their lives for about ninety minutes and watch good guys (& girls) and bad guys battle it out across the stars. What’s not to love?
Speaking of dads, there’s also a genuine single-father element to Bowser and Junior that I appreciated, personally.
Let me just say this, seeing The Super Mario Galaxy Movie on a tiny screen is a bit of a crime to your kids, at least for the first time. Splurge a little, you can watch Project Hail Mary and bore them to tears, or you can treat your little starlings to this funtastic space adventure.
Or, by all means, listen to the “critics” and miss the theater experience of doing barrel rolls with a freakin’ star fox. What the Hell do I know? Me, I’m a movie lover – NOT A CRITIC!
