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| Image/Universal Pictures |
The Super Mario Bros. Movie Review: Long gone are the times and aesthetics that in 1986 and then in 1993 clumsily attempted, using different languages and forms – albeit reserved for the cinema – to make the very successful Nintendo video game, Mario Bros. dated 1983, a possible commercial success of cinematic nature.
If in the first case, we are dealing with a product curiously halfway between film format and television format, i.e. the anime, "The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach" by Masami Hata, recently restored in 4K, in the second case the animation gives way to a bizarre live action that would like to move from the parts of more adult cyberpunk cinema, not only in a dark key, but also grotesque, referring as much to the model of Landis as to that of Reitman, missing both, and even risking to damage them. The only merit of Super Mario Bros. by Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel remains, if nothing else, that of being the first film in the history of cinema based on a video game.
Thirty years have passed and that highly successful Nintendo product, thanks to its "Mamma Mia" and "It's-a me, Mario!" which is Mario Bros., returns to global cinemas, once again at the center of a complex, raucous, colorful, amusing adaptation operation in constant dialogue between the languages that are typical of videogames and cinema, really putting all not to leave out the slightest detail and wink, as much to the dictates of the first, as to the rules of the second, running the risk - and perhaps precisely for the reason just described - of never really satisfying either the fans of the video game or the cinemagoers. Here because.
Being a stereotypical hybrid Italianoid plumber in modern-day Brooklyn
There is a crisis, but the entertainment industry will save us, or at least, this is hoped.
Even The Super Mario Bros. Movie talks about the social and work crisis as a scourge of our century, albeit in a carefree, childish, softened, and funny way, relating it to what the entertainment industry is capable of offering, in terms of visibility and support media to all those subjects who, deprived of the most basic social and working conditions, put their trust in them, hoping for external help, from the media, therefore in a wide diffusion of the explicit request.
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| Image/Universal Pictures |
The two brothers Mario and Luigi behave in the same way, bizarre mustachioed individuals who, starting from the origins of the very first Nintendo video game, should have responded - and corresponded - to the phenomenology of two Italian plumbers, or rather, Italian-Americans, or again, vaguely Italics characterized by an absolutely extreme, generalist and infantile stereotyping, even capable of confusing them with a more directly Mexican or Latin origin.
This is why Mario and Luigi can't be other than Italianoids, responding to a profound and continuously maintained and changed process of hybridization, both with respect to the concept of ethnicity - vague and once again confused - and to that of social ideology and behavior in society, or more specifically within the videogame, narrative and cinematographic universe of belonging, contaminated by a generic distillate that has come to settle with the succession and intertwining of filters and cultural contexts mostly Japanese and American, thus avoiding the Italian phenomenology and exploiting it as a sinister linguistic tool capable of guaranteeing humor and bizarreness to both characters and nothing more.
Except for a reading that has always interested fans and enthusiasts linked to the fact that the character of Mario seems to correspond very well to a cartoonish version of the narration of the "Mediterranean spirit", as pleasant and unpleasant at the same time, therefore objectively funny and interesting. In fact, it is no accident to rethink the almost always ambiguous characterization of Italians as the result of a backward, discriminatory, and naively racist social process.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie is a family tale… more Italian than that
The Super Mario Bros. Movie by Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic, taking full advantage of this discourse of hybridization, contamination, and distillation of ethnic groups and deep stereotyping, shows and tells the family of Mario and Luigi as typically Italian, or Italic, strong in an absolutely united family condition, shouted out loud and respected during the entire journey, so as to produce what turns out to be the most mature and unexpectedly adult reflection of the entire film, namely, the disappointment that the children observe on their fathers' faces and which they would like in all respects to make disappear, proving to them that they are strong and have great skills, enough to save the world.
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| Image/Universal Pictures |
Therefore, beyond the easy parallelism with the road movie and the metalinguistic and media discourse - cinema, comics, video games - this brand new film rendering of Mario Bros. can only be configured as a sunny, amused, colorful, and yet cleaned up on the family bond, and more specifically, on the indestructible bond that unites brothers and then again on the often stormy and conflicting, but ultimately sweet and understanding bond that exists between fathers and children.
That's why Mario and Luigi are catapulted into the universe of Princess Peach, the hipster King Kong, and the fearsome Bowser, in an attempt to obtain economic satisfaction capable of supporting their family and father. That's why Donkey Kong does his best to back up the initially unpleasant and adverse Mario to save the Mushroom Kingdom - and thus the whole world - from Bowser's fury, in the hope that the now elderly father will re-evaluate his maturity, seriousness, and tenacity. To heal a relationship, to settle differences,
A gender discourse that of Queen Peach, a woman who trains and guides men
Yet The Super Mario Bros. Movie is also much more and goes beyond the purely road and fantasy travel question between kingdoms, green pipes, carnivorous flowers, suspended tiles, and so on, the speech that remains and strikes the most - without forgetting the thunderous power and omnipresent of the chromatic variety that has always distinguished the Super Mario universe and which here explodes in a film and computer graphics rendition a la James Cameron's Avatar, complete with waterfalls, oceans, forests, and individuals with ever-changing pigmentation and conformation – it's just that of the young Princess Peach.
There is no shortage of male figures, yet they all appear as exclusively supportive and background. In fact, if Mario manages to make himself visible to Peach's eyes by suddenly appearing in her presence - Peach is still a queen - within the Mushroom Kingdom, this does not happen due to a particular virile or ferocious or powerful rendering of Mario, a short man, squat, mustachioed and bizarrely a prisoner of age and psycho-social condition that has never really been defined and definable, rather due to his diversity and then similarity to the queen herself, the only human in a world of hybrids.
Mario isn't strong outside of that world, but he can be. Bowser isn't cruel, not definitively at least, and only love and the female presence in his hard and seemingly impenetrable heart can save him. As well as the Kongs, at first isolated, peaceful, and extraneous to the conflict and only later involved as they are aware and staunch defenders of the cause, both thanks to Mario and Queen Peach.
Needless to go around further, The Super Mario Bros. Movie by Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic is around two nodes that reason and shape his narrative: the family and the feminine, here constantly predominant and highlighted as a leader and guide, for all those men – or more directly male figures – who become the support and shoulder of a very precise social condition that is reflected in our daily life, making it pale.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie – Conclusions and Evaluation
The third attempt at a cinematic rendering of the Mario Bros. videogame universe only partially succeeds, focusing on all the issues of aesthetics, style, and respect for a truly broad videogame universe which are never lacking here, easily reaching an unavoidable and, all in all, dutiful consent from the most ardent fans, risking at the same time alienating the cinematic spectator who is more alien to the matter, catapulted into an hour and a half of alternating entertainment, crazed and colorful aesthetics of a hybrid work between videogames and cinema, as well as continuous winks at the typically narrative elements of Super Mario from the inevitably necessary knowledge to the point of boring him, almost totally distancing him from the film experience and emotional participation.
Note on the soundtrack, which is carrying out a wonderful and very rich nostalgia operation, in more than a humorous - and parody - moment to Deadpool I and II, conquers and amuses, managing to involve the public, even if only momentarily in the experience collective that in fact wants and should be, from the first to the last shot The Super Mario Bros. Movie.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie is in cinemas starting Wednesday, April 5 and distributed by Universal Pictures.