Review: Video-game-inspired adventure is a colorful, creative story with more twists and turns than the plumbing under your sink
As in the original game, Mario and his dimwitted brother, Luigi , are plumbers, here struggling to jump-start their new business in Brooklyn. At the family table populated with Italian stereotypes out of a 1970s sitcom, their father tells Mario, a finicky eater who picks the mushrooms out of his pasta, that he will never amount to much.
After a disastrous first job, it looks like dad may be right. Still, Mario assures his brother that everything will be okay as long as they’re together. That idyllic promise doesn’t last long. As they try to repair a massive water main break, the brothers descend into a cavernous sewer system that spits them out into two rival underworlds: Mario in the vibrant Mushroom Kingdom, a place with clear echoes of “Alice in Wonderland,” where he meets Toad , a talking, humanoid fungus.
While the pretty production design will, overall, almost certainly appeal to children, the apocalyptic Dark Lands may be too intense, with scenes of fiery destruction that earn the film’s PG rating. The murky design of these scenes is the film’s weak point, as is a villain who, despite some entertaining flourishes, isn’t terribly interesting.
The Mushroom Kingdom is another matter, its flavors bright and intense yet somehow not stooping to the saccharine tone of a . When a sea of mushroom people gather around the palace, there’s a moment when the film looks like a brightly colored kids’ version of the art-house film “Last Year at Marienbad.”adults watching. It may help that Mario gains power by eating mushrooms — a good message about healthy eating, on the one hand, yet one with an obvious psychedelic resonance at the same time.
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