The last time the Super Mario Bros made a silver screen appearance was in 1993. The film had a star-studded lineup including Bob Hoskins, Dennis Hopper, and John Leguizamo, but thanks to the creative bipolar disorder of the writers and directors, the movie ended up being a complete disaster. In fact, the movie was so bad that Nintendo wouldn’t allow anyone to make another Mario movie for decades.

But the house Shigeru Miyamoto built eventually let down its guard and allowed Illumination Studios to give it another go. This time, the creators behind “Despicable Me” would ditch the live-action characters for their trademark computer-generated animation style. They would get big-name actors to add their voices to characters and this time, they’d stick to a recognizable plot.

It worked. As Brad Slager noted earlier, “Super Mario Bros. Movie” is a smash box office hit and further proof that if a studio ditches the woke nonsense and sticks to giving the fans what they want, a movie can be successful.

(READ: Hollywood Wokeness Takes Another Hit As the “Super Mario Bros Movie” Has Explosive Opening)

But is the movie good? Sure, box office success means a lot, but in today’s day and age, it could just mean people wanted to see something that didn’t involve some sort of messaging. So desperate are the people for a cinematic experience that doesn’t amount to writers and producers getting on a soapbox that they’d pay to see old 80s and early 90s commercials.

Alamo Drafthouse does that and it’s part of the theater’s charm, but I digress.

After having watched the movie myself, I came away with conflicting feelings and wondered if I had seen it under the wrong conditions. This caused me to see the movie from two different angles.

I’ll explain what I mean by this, but first let me give you the bottom line from the first perspective; the movie isn’t bad, but I wouldn’t say it’s the best movie Illumination has ever put out. It’s decent, but I wouldn’t say it qualifies as “good.”

Let’s start with the positive aspects of the film, and be warned, there are minor spoilers ahead.

Firstly, the film looks incredible. You can tell Illumination really took care of putting in the details, and I don’t just mean visual details, I mean details that longtime Mario fans will notice. In fact, Illumination really put in the fanservice work. I knew that at some point I’d have to see the movie again to catch all the details and easter eggs they put into the film.

Multiple Nintendo games that involve Mario and his typical cast are fully represented. If you’re a fan of Mario Kart, you get an entire sequence. Loved Super Smash Bros.? You get one too. It was a true pleasure to see these things on the big screen.

Power-ups act exactly as power-ups should in that world based on the information given to us by the games. You’re not going to find any sudden curveballs or “subversion of expectations” thrown in. It’s a meat and potatoes Mario adventure, and I think that’s what people really wanted. To be sure, it’s what Illumination delivered.

But there are negatives mixed in with positives.

The voice acting in this film ranges from top-notch to forgettable. Chris Pratt plays Mario with a surprisingly good performance that blows away the doubters. You know the acting is good when you forget the actor behind the character is there and Pratt manages to pull this off by adopting a light Brooklyn accent while maintaining his trademark positivity. Keegan-Michael Key’s “Toad” and Fred Armisen’s “Cranky Kong” were both pleasures to watch as they fully embraced their characters.

I can’t say this for every character, though. While Charlie Day (of “It’s Always Sunny In Philidelphia” fame) does a fantastic job of capturing Luigi’s spirit, I just kept hearing Charlie Day’s voice. The same could be said for Seth Rogen’s Donkey Kong. While Rogen put forward the energy necessary to play the character, he didn’t seem to do much to make me feel like he was anyone but Rogen in the booth. This could be a symptom of their voices being unique in nature, but I feel more could have been done to morph them a bit so that they became their characters, not just characters with their famous actor’s highly recognizable voices overlapped.

Both Anya Taylor-Joy and Jack Black were solid in their respective roles of “Princess Peach” and “Bowser,” but the director leaned a little bit too much into Black’s persona causing me to feel like I was watching Black, not Bowser. There’s even a point where Bowser sings a short ballad that felt way too much like a “Tenacious D” song. A funny moment in the movie, but one that takes away from Bowser as a villain in my opinion.

But the mix of positive and negative don’t stop there, and sadly it’s seen in the story itself. The story is pretty basic in terms of plot. Mario must save the Mushroom Kingdom from Bowser and rescue the princess. However, there are some things that are missing that make it seem a bit hollow.

For one, Princess Peach begins the movie as the most powerful person in all the land and not just in royal power. She’s strong, nimble, and capable of beating up almost everyone around her. As the movie reveals, she was pretty much the best from the get-go while Mario had to struggle to catch up to her. As it progresses, Peach does her fair share of rescuing and fighting, and while this works for Peach to a degree, it’s done too much to the point where it detracts from Mario’s importance to the story.

The real disappointment, at least for me, was Bowser. While his goal was to conquer all the kingdoms around him, his ultimate goal was to marry Princess Peach. Much is made of his infatuation with her and too many scenes involved him showing his insecurities about what she thought of him and her growing closeness with Mario. It really lowered his villainous arc and made him seem much less of an evil dictator who will stop at nothing to rule everything and more of an insecure man-child trying too hard to win over a woman.

Mario’s main goal in the movie is to rescue his brother Luigi who’d been captured by Bowser, which is a good motivation for Mario’s actions. Sadly, Luigi doesn’t do much until the end. He just kind of waits while being scared, and it makes his heroic actions near the finale seem a bit unearned.

But with all that said, earlier in the article I mentioned that I had seen this under the wrong conditions and this might be what is causing me to see it as a movie that’s okay at best. As I told my wife later on, the one thing I kept thinking the entire time was “I wish my son was old enough to enjoy this.”

This, for me at least, created the “parent perspective” for the movie and as I thought more about it, this is arguably the more important perspective to have.

At the end of the day, this movie was made for children. Yeah, it’s light on plot, but while I wanted deeper story beats that really fleshed the world and characters out, I realized I went into this movie as an old Mario fan who’s developed a taste for good stories. If I were to view this from the perspective of a parent and not a grown man who grew up playing Mario, then this movie knocks it out of the ballpark.

It has everything. Silly characters, amazing visuals, hilarious villains, brotherly bonds, and all the fun things you’d recognize from Mario games. There’s no political messaging in it so it’s safe for my son to watch. He won’t be overly scared by Bowser because, at the end of the day, as scary as Bowser is physically he’s kind of silly. His ballad about his love of Peach really takes the edge off him, making him a more welcome sight for kids on screen.

When you see this from a parent’s perspective, the movie really falls into place, and maybe for parents in today’s day and age, this is a sorely needed movie. It’s a fun, safe, and innocent movie that will bring you and your kid together, especially if you’re an old Mario fan like me. It’ll definitely give you things to excitedly talk about later with your kid, especially how you loved Mario when you were his or her age.

Brandon the old Mario fan might have been slightly disappointed by what he saw, but Brandon the dad can’t recommend this film to fellow parents more. Load up the kiddos and go see it.

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