In 2023’s The Super Mario Bros Movie, audiences followed two Brooklyn plumber-brothers through a big green pipe to another dimension where anthropomorphic toadstool citizenry lived under the benevolent rule of a once-orphaned woman named Peach (voiced by Anya Taylor-Joy). Now in 2026, with the general conceit of the Mushroom Kingdom established, the sequel, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, has only new characters to introduce and new worlds to explore. And according to blockbuster precedent, now that exposition has been laid out, a sequel is expected to sprint full tilt into a whole fresh cosmos of lucrative, fully exploitable intellectual property.
It does so unrelentingly. We join the aforementioned brothers—heroic and characterless Mario (Chris Pratt) and his delightfully squeaky counterpoint Luigi (Charlie Day)—as they embrace the Mushroom Kingdom. No longer plumbers or small business owners, they instead travel to various fantastical biomes to enact vigilante justice on fanged plants or hammer-wielding turtles, which typically involves jumping on their heads. Early in the film, Mario and Luigi befriend lost dinosaur creature Yoshi (Donald Glover), who becomes their pet/best friend and then quickly steps aside so the movie can pump in more franchise figures.
Meanwhile, the first film’s fiend, vile shelled-lizard beefcake Bowser (Jack Black), attempts to convince Mario and Luigi to let him go, claiming that since the climax of their first adventure, in which he was shrunk and imprisoned in a dollhouse-sized castle, he is sufficiently rehabilitated. Not helping his case is that his son, Bowser Jr. (Benny Safdie), has assembled an armada of spaceships to save his dad and wield swift retribution for Bowser’s defeat. Bowser Jr. has also kidnapped Princess Rosalina (Brie Larson), matriarch of a society of literal starchildren, whose star magic he intends to use to power a massive gun so he can, I dunno, blow up other planets? Kill millions of souls?
No, this kids’ movie is not willing to address the implications of genocide. This is fine. I’m being serious here: Kids’ movies do not need to contend with mass death. I will give you that, Super Mario Galaxy Movie.
But not long into the film, everything begins to feel inconsequential. Stakes, gravity, time, money, ethical consumption under capitalism, the satisfaction of human connection, this review—none of it seems to have any effect, or will at any point have any effect, on what’s on screen. As characters fly, float, or soar everywhere, falling from fathomless heights to barely get the wind knocked out of them or outrunning more than one edifice crumbling into an avalanche, peril’s pretty much absent and risks are all but pre-mitigated.
Of course, action setpieces abound, and fight choreography occasionally dazzles, but no sense of danger approaches any of our many protagonists. Bowser isn’t really bad, until he is, but then his badness barely rises above a kind of malignant annoyance.
In the video game, you can die. Granted, you come back to life if you’ve found enough green mushroom 1-ups, but in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie? Animals fall into lava and emerge as cackling skeletons; Mario and Luigi have not and never will get a concussion. No one loses anyone or anything.
We should expect as much from Illumination, the animation studio who, with the Despicable Me movies, tamped down the role of the archetypal villain into a gray putty. But The Super Mario Galaxy Movie fully refuses to actually build any tension around its characters making difficult decisions, growing, or learning something about themselves. Kids will adore this movie—it’s a brilliant spectacle—even though it treats them like they’re dopes.
Undoubtedly, some kids are dopes. As are many, arguably most, adults. I myself am a dope, and I am also a fan of the Mario games, which is why, despite my brain pretty much sounding the alarm from the moment the Nintendo logo blipped on screen, I reveled in what can only best be described as fan service.
More so than in the first Super Mario movie, directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic (and returning writer Matthew Fogle) use much of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie to remind the world of the franchise’s sidescrolling origins—the 2007 3-D platformer of mostly the same name. They’re linking the incomprehensible technology currently used to bring these characters to life with the pixelated blobs humbly occupying cathode ray tube televisions in the late ’80s. This is nostalgia bait of the highest order, shuffling in non-Mario Nintendo-brand characters like Starfox (Glen Powell) and Pikimin to expand the cinematic universe, and alluding to such Mario entries as Super Mario Sunshine and Yoshi’s Island, which only devoted gamers may clock.
It is all well done, and ultimately a film that is both sincerely heartwarming and devoid of truly thoughtful worldbuilding, beautifully made by extremely talented administrators, animators, voice actors, and consultants. I say this with both immense respect and ennui-ridden derision, the two canceling each other out.
Canceling itself out is how the action tends to operate too. Set pieces are so unchanging in energy and scope that all of the excitement exists as a duration of inertia, constant from beginning credits to the end. With no real pauses or reflection or downtime, but no real climactic peaks either, the whole 90 minutes ends up relatively inert.
Then again, that’s a video game for you. And as a sequel to an adaptation of a beloved video game, which was itself an adaptation to a beloved sequel of a beloved video game, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is something corporately special to behold. It’s bountiful with the imagination required to wrangle so much property. It is divine asset management. Let’s-a go?
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie opens in wide release on Fri Apr 3, 98 minutes, rated PG