The Super Mario Galaxy Movie

And, sadly, some sort of unfortunate normal service is restored as The Super Mario Galaxy Movie may have sounded the death knell for the ‘videogame/retro movie’ resurgence before it’s even really begun.

Well, probably not, considering it’ll still make mega bucks and TV is helpfully carrying the load with The Last of Us, Fallout et al (maybe let’s not mention the upcoming He-Man movie at this point.)

It was inevitable though that the first ‘cash grab’ would land sooner rather than later and, somewhat predictably, it comes after the first Mario film broke all sorts of records.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is also not even an outright disaster. It’ll please the little ones, offers plenty of Easter Eggs (conveniently enough for the Easter weekend) for gaming fans and retains the nice animation style and the stacked voice cast from the original.

Having said that, you’ll do well to even recognise most of that talent unfortunately with many voices warped and changed.

So what makes it not quite stack up to the first one?

Simply, it lacks the charm, the originality and, crucially, the sense of story.

This is here to throw quite literally everything it can at the screen in a hail of brightly coloured randomness and it doesn’t even care if any of it sticks.

Sure, there is a ‘plot’ of sorts but this is more akin to an AI-generated cutscene for a game that will baffle pretty much everyone watching.

It’s a nigh-on fever dream at points of just ‘stuff’ and, bizarrely, as much as you’ll want to admire how much they throw in, it’s all not really in service of anything and, whisper it, it’s curiously boring.

There are, of course, some decent bits. Jack Black is once again the MVP and he gives Bowser some more funny lines as well as a quasi-redemptive-ish arc that he largely makes work.

Glenn Powell is also great as Star-Fox and his anime-styled origin story is an actually interesting and fresh bit of the film which does hint as to where things could go in the future (Smash Bros?)

There’s also a fairly epic, sort-of-Star Wars casino fight that is uproarious and, like the last film, every time the film drops any 8 bit Gameboy graphics stuff, the adults in the audience are likely to raise a smile.

So it’s maybe not quite the cynical cash grab in every way but it’s still a curiously un-moving and largely un-fun film that is squarely for the smaller ones.

Not enough to ruin a franchise, and there’s still just enough curiosity left to see what comes next, but this is a sad hark back to the days where you couldn’t rely on a videogame movie.

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