The Mario franchise is always going to be a hard video game property to adapt into a movie. Not only because its setup provides merely a basic outline for a plot at best (mustachioed Italian plumber saves princess from turtle monster) leaving the devising of any actual storytelling entirely up to the scriptwriters, but also due to exactly how outlandish the world Shigeru Miyamoto created is. The first attempt at doing so went about it in likely the strangest way possible. It was as if the directing husband-and-wife duo of Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel said, “Hey, you know what there’s a lot of in Mario? Mushrooms. We should take some.” and then concocted the resulting gonzo dark fantasy nightmare from there. This second effort meanwhile does manage to more closely resemble its source material. It doesn’t make the experience any less weird, the people behind it just appear to have swapped out the hallucinogenics for cocaine. This thing moves at a breakneck pace. It kind of makes the progression of events at the beginning and end of the film feel really unnatural, but honestly I prefer this to sitting in a theater for 2+ hours. The animated adventure clocks in at a brisk 1h 32m runtime, credits included I believe (stayed tuned for not one, but TWO stingers). This is a welcomed change from the modern norm of having to dedicate a fairly significant portion of your day towards going to the cinema. Like, it was still daylight when I walked out of the screening and I had time to go out for a nice dinner afterwards. It was great! No, its brevity wasn’t really a problem for me. It was the humor. Don’t get me wrong, there is some really funny stuff here, but for the most part the jokes felt identical to ones I’ve seen in a thousand other comedies. As if someone took any of the countless random kiddie flicks we’ve received in the past 10 years and slapped a Super Mario skin overtop of it. The final product comes off as generic and unbefitting of the brand as a result. Not to mention they did the Kongs dirty and the whole unspoken love triangle element to the conflict is vaguely uncomfortable. Like seriously Illumination, I could have done without the subtle (or in Bowser’s case, not so subtle) implication that these characters from my childhood might be interested in boning each other. I could see a sequel to this being pretty good however, now that we’ve got this awkward introductory hurdle out of the way. It leaves the door open for a lot of compelling directions for them to go in the future with spin-offs (I would KILL for a worthy Luigi’s Mansion or Donkey Kong Country adaptation). Unfortunately, what we got in the meantime is a feature that, were it not for the name, would be totally unremarkable and tries to distract you from that fact with a constant bombardment of references, Easter eggs, nostalgic sound effects, and a somewhat odd pop soundtrack. Which based on the positive audience reception appears to be enough for most people. Me personally though, I’d take the original 1993 absolute fever dream of a movie over this any day. At least that was interesting.