![]() There have been approximately 50 movies based on video games, and most of them are terrible. The movie also strikes a note of agreeably transgressive comedy when Cranky Kong and his crew, who’ve been placed in hanging cages, have to the endure the presence of a glowing star who voices Debbie Downer existential despair in the ickiest of baby voices. I change identity by tapping a Power-up box, therefore I am. But when Mario wins the duel by transforming himself into a cat, all because he is now wearing a furry cat costume, that’s pure video-game surrealism. We know that Mario can balance on a girder to face off against Donkey Kong, even as Donkey Kong’s dad, Cranky Kong (voiced by Fred Armisen with the kind of extreme New York accent that somehow feels right at home in the Jungle Kingdom), cheers for Mario’s demise. Movie” has that too many animated films don’t - I would say, without overstating it, that it links the film to the spirit of “Yellow Submarine” - is a rollicking aesthetic of transmutation. ![]() (That didn’t help “Super Mario Bros.” in 1993.) It’s because the movie, as directed by Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic (from a script by Matthew Fogel), is a serious blast, with a spark of enchantment - that je ne sais quoi fusion of speed and trickery, magic and sophistication, and sheer play that…well, you feel it when you see it. It’s going to be a huge, huge hit, but not just because of its beloved gamer pedigree. ![]() The animated movies I’ve been most drawn to have been off the Pixar grid - movies like “Trolls” and “Ralph Breaks the Internet,” which merge a kind of kinetic virtuosity with an emotional flair that sneaks up on you. And the Pixar brand, much as it saddens me to say it, has in recent years lost some of its humanistic luster. So much of it has become rote, with an empty fractious dazzle that doesn’t ultimately sustain interest. There’s a way that mainstream animation, not to mention my own taste in it, has been evolving. When Bowser is onscreen with his flaming red eyebrows and S&M arm bands, his gap-toothed reptile leer, his Meat Loaf-meets-Axl Rose soft-rock odes to Peach, and his nerd’s megalomania, the audience is in heaven. Having a villain who’s a vulnerable ogre you’re at once appalled, amused, and fascinated by makes this a very different sort of kinetic kiddie fantasia. Bowser is in love with Princess Peach, even as he’s planning to attack her empire, and Black, conjuring something very different from his usual hipster-stoner vibe, makes Bowser a domineering but deeply insecure romantic, like the Phantom of Opera as a neurotic troglodyte. Jack Black, who voices this horny demon, gives a stupendous performance. Bowser is a turtle too, if a rather monstrous one - he’s like a fusion of Lionel Barrymore, the Wayland Flowers puppet Madame, and, a T. Mario then teams up with Princess Peach to save her kingdom from Bowser, a fire-breathing beastie who commands a vast army of Koopas, who are turtles. ![]() Mario just wants to rescue his brother, but then he meets Princess Peach ( Anya Taylor-Joy), who rules over the Mushroom Kingdom’s denizens, who have spherical mushroom heads and the faces of airbrushed babies they’re led by Toad (Keegan-Michael Key), a cuddlebug with attitude. Luigi gets dumped into the Dark Lands, a Tim Burton nightworld of gnarled trees and creepy chattering skeletons. Mario lands in the Mushroom Kingdom, where the big red ‘shrooms with white polka dots suggest a Wonderland designed for the Smurfs. ![]() But then they delve into the sewer to fix a water-main break and get sucked down into an alternate universe. Mario and his timid brother, Luigi (Charlie Day), are devoted to each other, and they’re out to start their own plumbing business (complete with a TV commercial in which they speak in fake kitsch Italian accents). The action isn’t vacuous or ponderous - it makes speed and light seem concretely alive. We’ve enmeshed in every choice, every movement. When Mario, the mustached, overalls-wearing Italian plumber of Nintendo fame (voiced by Chris Pratt as an eager Brooklyn everyman), swirls down a New York sewer and into the Mushroom Kingdom, where he learns to leap from one now-you-see-it floating airborne block to the next, or faces off against the preening, super-strong but not really all that mighty Donkey Kong (Seth Rogen) on a network of red girders in a gladiatorial arena that’s hanging 2,000 feet in the air, or zips along a superhighway of pure rainbow light in a go-kart race that’s aggressive enough to look like something out of “Mad Max: Candy-Land Road,” the movie doesn’t so much duplicate the logistics of a Mario game as conjure the spirit of the game. ![]()
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