so my conclusion is basically this movie is exactly what i expected its just another illumination studios cash grab :/ spoilers below
these are just my first thoughts and might be kinda disjointed but im honestly glad i didnt pay to see it
First, the things i liked: The animation was very pretty. Bowser’s face was nice and stretchy and expressive, but i knew that from the trailer already. I liked the way Peach’s dress was animated too, very flowy and occasionally she would push her gloves back up her arms which i thought was a nice touch.
at some point Mario, Peach, and Toad customize their own karts and Toad rolls out in the biggest most obnoxious car with shades on, this was the only time i laughed the entire movie.
Ok so now why it sucks lmao
save for bowser there are absolutely no character voices its just a bunch of celebrities doing their respective shticks, there are very little character building scenes to establish anything about the characters (we get a brief backstory for peach but learn literally nothing about her other than that she wasn’t born there)
its hilarious too bcus people on twitter were saying she was going to have personality based on the trailers and then she had like. absolutely none lmao. Peach is written to be so goddamn bland i kept waiting for a joke about it. She’s got whatever skill the movie needs for her in the moment and she’s a princess. that’s it ? Everything she does is very predictable I think the closest she got to interesting was when she was lying.
Luigi does nothing until the end as well, the scenes from the trailer are like. more than half of his time in the entire movie. way to show us the Bros. i think illumination owes an apology to all the monsterfucker artists who got so excited.
Seth Rogan (im not even going to call him donkey kong bcus its literally just seth rogan) was annoying as he is in every movie but he probably got the most character development out of any of them, which is to say, Any character development. He meets Mario, gets beaten by Mario, hates mario, then they work together and he doesnt hate him anymore. god i hope this movie doesnt make much money
Crisp Rat was boring. I knew this and was still disappointed. i have no notes because Mario had basically no agency the whole movie, he just went where people told him to go and did what people told him to do. The only reason he managed to scrape together more personality than peach was because he hated mushrooms, which. sucks lmao
The dialogue is boring as piss, there’s never any clear or interesting explanation on the world, its just a brief description of what they’re doing and then they do it with the exception of a few mentions of videogame mechanics (that aren’t actually relevant to the movie its just referencing the source material). the conversations are all so short and the jokes were painfully unfunny. There was no variation in the slapstick which made it all feel too rhythmic and therefor boring (how tf do you make slapstick boring??? idk but they did it)
They kept repeating a lot of lines and jokes as if they were going to be more powerful the second time but it just hammered home how unfunny and awkward all the dialogue was.
the movie moves incredibly fast, its just location to location to location there’s no time to appreciate the different ‘levels’ or do anything meaningful in any of them, once theyve done the singular task in that place, the movie moves to the next. there’s zero tension to anything because the moment anything bad happens its immediately resolved in the next scene or the next scene comes so fast there’s no time to dwell on the bad thing and then its resolved.
which would be fine if i was playing a videogame, but this is supposed to be a movie i thought. I kind of wanted it to slow down so I could appreciate the animation more. Im not kidding when I say they only did One thing in each location before moving on to a new one.
The toads in the games have names, idk why they didnt in the movie. I think it would’ve been funny if the toad travelling with them had a silly name
Bowser’s obsession with peach was good, but his vendetta against mario simply because he was concerned peach Might like him was. weak. just bad writing.
maybe its just because i personally loved the blue mushroom ability in the games, but i was kinda bummed there wasn’t a moment where someone used that to their advantage. turn tiny and jump extra high or fit through tiny pipes and traverse a tiny space. nah it just makes you small and weaker now ig
Maybe i missed it but there were no chain chomps :(