Film Review: The Super Mario Bros Movie is a little one-dimensional

Everyone’s favourite Italian plumbers hit the big screen, and waste no time getting sucked into a parallel world whilst trying to save Brooklyn from disaster.

The Super Mario Bros Movie: Mario, Toad and Peach face into adventure

• The Super Mario Bros Movie 
• ★★★☆☆

Everyone’s favourite Italian plumbers hit the big screen in The Super Mario Bros Movie (PG), and waste no time getting sucked into a parallel world whilst trying to save Brooklyn from disaster.

Matters go from bad to worse when Mario (voiced by Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day) find themselves in a Mushroom Kingdom threatened by the brimstone-breathing Bowser (Jack Black), whose happiness will only be complete if he can marry Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy).

The Super Mario Bros Movie

What follows, as anyone who has ever played the iconic computer game will anticipate, is much running and jumping, and leaping across lava, and sprinting across bricks mysteriously suspended in mid-air — all of which, it should be said, is cleverly built into the story of how Mario and Luigi come to deserve the appellation Super (spoiler alert: it involves the consumption of power-up mushrooms).

Aimed at a younger audience, the movie might be a little one-dimensional for those who actually pay for the tickets, but it’s a pacy, upbeat tale with plenty of slapstick humour that powers along at a relentless rate.

(cinema release)