Avis des critiques

But in going to such great lengths to avoid [its predecessor's] grim weirdness, The Super Mario Bros. Movie filmmakers have flattened the concept into benign nothingness. They’ve course-corrected into the side of a mountain. There’s no heartbeat here.

[Super Mario] may as well have been written by an algorithm... It’s hard to demand all that much from a Mario Bros film when its source material has been historically devoid of plot, but shouldn’t we be allowed to demand a little more than mere competency?

Fizzy fun in the moment but ultimately as hollow as one of its whizzing koopa shells... [Super Mario] will bring guaranteed joy to younger viewers and leave oldies with a nostalgic itch to pick up an NES controller and start whacking the hell out of the ‘B’ button again. But if you’re not in one of those two demographics, it’s much thinner pickings.

A consistently inventive animate feature... Matthew Fogel takes what seems like unpromising gameplay and works it into a story that takes more twists and turns than the plumbing under your sink.

[A] serviceable adaptation of the beloved Nintendo franchise. It’s the best outcome we could have hoped for: fun for kids; very okay for adults... [Super Mario] belts along with an assault of candy colours and a commendable command of canonical detail.

Since the 1980s, Nintendo has built its reputation on gleeful, ingenious entertainment that delights in design. Conversely, The Super Mario Bros. Movie is empty-calorie, time-filling amusement for the school holidays. In other words, a licence to print money.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie isn’t an actively unpleasant way to spend an afternoon, but the glib literalism with which it applies cinematic narrative to video games’ abstractions can’t hold a candle to the wrenching pathos and self-discovery of a night on the track with real-life loved ones and Mario in his original medium.

Fans of this movie will shout from the rooftops that the scripting for something called “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” doesn’t need to be a strength... But I would ask why fans of a franchise that has inspired so much love for generations must be satisfied with the absolute minimum regarding storytelling.

This loud, hectic movie doesn’t overstay its welcome, but it wouldn’t have the material to last a second longer. It’s bright, busy, inoffensive and exactly the opposite of the weird, dark, edgy 1993 movie adaptation. That may be better for the business of Mario, but it’s not exactly terribly interesting either.

It’s all laser-designed to tickle the nostalgia adenoids of Nintendo nerds. But it ultimately never feels more than just a very high-definition, feature-length video game cutscene – the bit you sit through while waiting to play the actual game.

This much-trailed, much-hyped new animated feature is tedious and flat in all senses, a disappointment to match the live-action version in 1993. It’s visually bland in ways that reminded me of European knockoff animations and utterly inert in narrative terms, with a baffling lack of properly funny lines.

[The film refuses] to do anything original or all that interesting with the gaming icon. The order of the day here is cheap fan service... [Super Mario] does relatively little to justify its existence outside of serving as brand extension. It’s bright, bounces from one nostalgia-soaked moment to the next, and is meticulously designed to be as inoffensive as possible.