David Ehrlich wrote maybe the funniest convergence of corporate muckraking and movie review in his piece for Indiewire, “The Absolute Hell of Watching a Movie at Alamo Drafthouse in 2026” in which he goes to see the Super Mario movie with his son and comes out of the experience completely disillusioned about his once-favored theater franchise. When I bought tickets for my family to see this movie together, I bought it with the intention of the gremlins maybe catching their first urges to play video games. We got costumes, the littler monster wore a mustache and overalls begrudgingly once they figured out that Princess was an option. They hadn’t expressed interest in seeing the original one billion dollar behemoth that eventually spawned this sequel, which is technically a breach of contract we have about not watching movies out of order (read exceptions: Trolls World Tour and Shrek 2 and, I guess The Mandalorian and Grogu, although I’m going to argue that this is actually the best entry point for small children into that franchise), and I wasn’t sure that it would add that much for them to see it anyway.
The opening sequence of this movie the inexplicable discovery of Yoshi, who has no lines, but receives one of the most amazing sight gags in the whole movie with his montage about visiting NYC. At which point we are transported to a space ship run by Princess Rosalina who is a high-powered wizard who gets defeated and captured by the very first threat to her in the very first scene. She then spends the rest of the movie damseling while her star babies hatch a plan to save her. Meanwhile Mario, Luigi, Bowser, and Peach are placed into a series of interlocking missions that basically return them to the same place at the same time with minimal coordination and one dope zero gravity fight scene against a giant penguin mob boss. This leads to a cameo by Glen Powell whose entire purpose seems to be to stake some territory to protect him from being pillaged by some other production house–Zelda’s fate.
But I think what really affected me the most about watching this weirdly regressive, cheerless shambling zombie of a video game adaptation was the pure joy that my gremlins had watching the original Super Mario Bros movie on the plane on the way back from our trip, the way that Mario turns into a kitty to defeat Donkey Kong, who at no point is cast as heroic or likeable, despite all the forces that might have wanted to set up for a DK spin-off of his own. And his cameo was a complete surprise to audiences at the time! That movie felt like a send-up to classic video games but also the Super Smash franchise which mashed up the Nintendo universe into a single battle arena of nostalgia. That movie also contained within it sendups to Mario Kart in ways that felt innovative and fresh because of its willingness to play with multiple sandboxes for its settings. Galaxy doesn’t really do that at all. I came in prepared for at least three improvised songs by Jack Black and the fact that he doesn’t sing at all really underutilized what was the breakout star of the first movie. The villains are surprisingly flat, rivaled only by the lack of dynamism of its heroes. The best that can be said about this movie is that its target demographic probably doesn’t even notice what it’s missing.
