the mario movie is REALLY GOOD YOU GUYS OMG (mostly)

(edit: to preface, this blog post is pretty much spoiler-free and doesn't really discuss specific events in the movie, so if you haven't watched the movie yet but still want to read some rando's 1200-word review of it then you can!)

okay so i'll be honest, i was not highly optimistic about this movie. sure the animation looked incredible, but come on, it's an illumination movie. you know there's gonna be cringey jokes about poop and farts and whatever else, and oh god chris pratt is gonna drag the whole thing down either way, the only reason i saw it in theaters was because a bunch of my friends were also going. and oh boy let me tell you i have NEVER been more delighted to be proven wrong!

ok first of all i have to talk about crisp rat. sorry. trust me i was SO mad when they announced that he would be the red wahoo man. when the first trailer dropped i became an outright hater. how could they do that to charles martinet!! is what i said. so nobody is gonna believe me when i say.. i actually didn't hate chris pratt mario...? in fact i would say he was... pretty good..?! for most of the movie i could completely forget that he was even chris pratt. if you're at all familiar with the super mario super show (and you should be if you were watching ytp's in 2012 like any self-respecting internet user was at the time) then you're going to get used to how mario and luigi sound in this movie almost instantly. i was furious that charles martinet apparently got demoted to just a cameo, but the truth is that just his mario voice was a cameo, and as a character that looked like jump-man too, which i thought was really cool! mr. martinet also had a role as a recurring side character, so it wasn't like he just got one throwaway line in the entire movie. i was happy about that!

another thing that really surprised me is that there was NO cringe. okay well there were a couple of lines that were a little cringe but for an illumination movie it was stuff that was easy to ignore. no farting, no burping, no mario twerking. thank fucking god! a joke i saw people making when this movie was announced was that there would be a quiet, melodramatic scene where mario and luigi have a misunderstanding, hate each other for part of the movie, and have to make up with each other by the end. i am thrilled to report that did not fucking happen! there was nearly a scene like that with mario and donkey kong of all characters, but it was a fake-out of that trope in a way that i thought was genuinely funny. actually that's something that i can praise about the movie as a whole--it was genuinely funny and not in a super kiddy way. it got some really good laughs out of my entire friend group. we saw a late-night showing so there were no kids in the theater, but i do think the comedy of the movie would be effective for kids and adults.

the entire narrative and story flowed together shockingly well. nothing felt shoehorned in to me. i expected the mario kart sequence in particular to be extremely jarring and out-of-place but it actually had a very natural lead-in and didn't feel jarring at all! also, mario and princess peach had some romantic tension between them, but it was actually fairly subtle and didn't take up a huge amount of screen time, and more importantly didn't come at the expense of the rest of the narrative. in fact it contributed to the plot by going against bowser's clearly-stated motivations. maybe one of the best-executed straight romances i've ever seen in a kid's movie to be honest.

umm what else.. of course jack black fucking KILLED it as bowser he ate that performance UP man, i also LOVED charlie day's luigi, really nearly every vocal performance in the movie was just stellar, except for anya taylor-joy as peach, which i personally found unfortunately lukewarm but serviceable. (it might not even be her fault to be fair, because the character she played was... pretty boring, but i'll talk about that more in a minute) i also thought seth rogen's donkey kong voice was weird and didn't fit him, i never really got used to it throughout the movie, but his line delivery was still good. oh and i LOVED the score, hearing all the homages to themes from tons of different mario games throughout the movie was SO fun. the score was executed much much better than either of the sonic movies (although i enjoyed those too).

okay so now that i've spent four paragraphs gushing about this movie i want to say that i have two major gripes with it. first, they sidelined luigi HARD (he was in prison, off-screen, for like half the movie) in favor of peach, which i wouldn't have minded if not for that fact that princess peach was not in the movie! they replaced her with Impostor Peach. Impostor Peach is a boring, generic hollywood action girlboss. she has no actual spice or flavor. just played extremely straight and serious. like i said before, i personally don't think that anya taylor-joy's performance did her any favors, but it was mostly the writers' fault. she did have some scenes that i liked, but i think it is cruel that they did this to a character whose personality has been well-established and loved for the past 30 years.

i need the people on twitter saying "finally they gave peach a personality!" to understand that princess peach was ALREADY a badass. yeah she gets kidnapped by bowser, and mario goes to save her, but she's not a helpless damsel in distress. honestly i always thought she was supposed to be a subversion of that trope in terms of personality despite her role in many mario games. she's regal, self-possessed, and sassy. she runs a kingdom all by herself and is loved by her people. she's never submissive to bowser, even in the games, and the impression i always got is that she's not helpless against bowser, it's just that, you know, bowser is a giant fucking fire-breathing turtle covered in spikes. it's not that peach is helpless, mario has just huge balls coated in steel LOL. all of this is why i honestly think it's misogynistic to claim that princess peach "doesn't have a personality" because she does. is it because she wears pink and is feminine? does that cancel out her actual personality to these people? because yeah, that's much more misogynistic than her being kidnapped by a turtle lol. i loved how peach was written in super paper mario, she fucking slayed in that game imho. if she was written more like that in the mario movie i probably wouldn't have minded luigi getting sidelined. but that's not what we got and even as a pretty casual mario fan that's kinda hurtful. and yes i see the comedy in claiming to be a "casual mario fan" after i just wrote more than 1000 words about the fucking mario movie but if you know anyone who's an actual hardcore fan of any nintendo IP you probably know what i mean. nintendo makes games that inspire strong feelings in people! i do get the impression they understood that while making this movie, for the most part.

overall, they did a great job, and i definitely want to watch this movie again despite my strongly-worded complaints, which is not something i say often! i had a great time!