Illumination is going to make a new Super Mario Bros movie, and what that means to you probably depends on your age. If you’re young enough to be the target audience of Illumination’s other movies – the Despicable Me franchise, Minions, The Secret Life of Pets et al – chances are you don’t know who Super Mario is. If you’re in your teens, you might be wondering why anyone would take a beloved video game character and insert him into a medium as passive as film. But if you’re like me – if you’re just easing the corner into middle age – then this is quite easily the worst news of all time.
Because if you’re my age, you remember the last Super Mario Bros movie. Worse, you remember the Super Mario Bros movie coming out right at the peak of your infatuation with Super Mario, and the feeling of vertiginous disappointment at being tricked into watching such a muddled, muddied rip-off of a film. The script was rewritten after the sets had already been built. It was, by his own admission, Bob Hoskins’ biggest disappointment. The 1993 Super Mario Bros movie should have been a line in the sand – a warning to the rest of the world that no good can come of making films about video game characters.
It wasn’t, and examples as recent as Michael Fassbender’s dopey Assassin’s Creed film prove that nothing has been learned. But even so, a new Super Mario Bros film feels like a kick in the face.
It’s not that Illumination won’t make it pretty, or that they’ll repeat the mistake of making the whole film about evolved dinosaurs set in the non-canonical city of Dinohattan. No, the problem is Mario himself. What makes him work as game character is his complete and utter lack of personality. Stick him in any situation and he’ll blankly start doing the right thing, like a concussed sheepdog. He has no inner life to speak of. He has an unspecified infatuation with a princess, his look and profession both came from the design limitations of 8-bit graphics, and he sometimes says “let’s-a go” in a manner that often seems uncomfortably stereotypical. And that’s it.
Mario is such a blank slate that in his newest game – the rapturously received Super Mario Odyssey – he actually plays second fiddle to his own hat. That’s how thinly drawn Mario is: Nintendo stuck a pair of googly eyes on his cap, called it Cappy in a moment of genuine unimaginative thinking, and it instantly had enough charisma to reduce Mario to a bystander.
This isn’t to do Mario down. He’s a wonderful mascot for Nintendo and a terrific character for a game. He’s a void into which we project our own feelings and characteristics. He’s Mickey Mouse. He’s Anastasia Steele. He is the perfect avatar for his original format, but a truly lousy character for a film. Even in the short-lived Super Mario Bros Super Show! cartoon – banging theme tune aside – he was nothing more than an empty protagonist who played the straight-man to a range of more interesting characters.
So why make a Super Mario Bros movie now? The blame probably rests at the feet of his rival Sonic the Hedgehog, who’ll soon be the subject of his own film. And while that won’t fare any better – Sonic is just as hollow a frontman as Mario – at least he has his cool ’tude to fall back on. Mario doesn’t even have that. We’d all better pray that Cappy has a role in this new film, otherwise it’s going to be a hellishly long slog for everyone. Please, Mario, just stay in games where you belong.
