Summary, the Mario Brothers are threatened by the arrival of Bowser Jr who has set out to find his father after the events of the first film.
So on the press tour for this film Charlie Day was asked who his Luigi from recent American History was and said the murder who shot the CEO in an act of left wing defiance. This was pretty breaking at the time of writing this review, and sadly it does impact enjoyment of the film, as Luigi was a highlight before this incredibly poorly thought through statement.
The film itself is good and perfectly serviceable, and more of the same if you or your kids liked the first film you will like this, however, where this film is let down from the first is that it doesn’t have the same emotional core. The first film had Mario’s feelings of insecurity, Bowser’s love of Peach and even the depressed Luma to give the film stakes this one really doesn’t have that. You have the father son stuff with Bowser and his son, and the sisterhood storyline between Peach and Rosalita, but neither of these hit the same depth of feeling as the stuff from the first film. It was nice to see Mario and Peach as a couple get teased out more, this is an important part of the games that the first film did not spend enough time with. One assumed that that Mario asking Peach out would be one of the post credits scenes of the film but it wasn’t.
The adventure is interesting you see a lot of the galaxy and a lot of new things, this is mainly a chance to set up new films or to promote different IPs, obviously a film cannot spend the same amount of time with a universe as a game, but it does feel like in each of these cases it is just window dressing it is like look its Star Fox, or oh look its Daisy rather than having the world’s feel lived in or the characters seem like they matter. For example if they had replaced Star Fox with a different Nintendo character would it really have mattered at all, not really. That’s the problem in a nutshell. Nowhere is this truer than with Yoshi, not only do they have Yoshi be out and about in the over world without anyone thinking it was weird, but also all the character’s function is to follow Mario around and act like one of the minions characters. The fact is if you were to play one of the Yoshi games you would see the character has a lot more personality than he was given in the film.
The music was a lot better this time around, it was more classic game music rather than horribly forced in pop music, and the end credits that showed scenes from the film in puppet form was a lot of fun so it gets bonus points for those things.
Overall, it is serviceable and fun to a degree but there is a hollowness to it.
3/5
Pros.
Mario and Peach
The Music and Puppet Show
The scope of the film
Cons.
It has a lot of new characters but they don’t need to be there and it just feels like a shop window
The emotional core of the film is not enough
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