The Super Mario Bros Movie — a beloved game made squarely into a film for actual children

Can being ploddingly risk-averse become an active selling point? The answer might come with The Super Mario Bros Movie, an animated riff on the beloved Nintendo intellectual property, haunted by a brutal past. Back in 1993, sibling plumbers Mario and Luigi inspired Hollywood’s first real attempt to tap the emerging market of the games industry. The result, Super Mario Bros, starred a visibly regretful Bob Hoskins in a doomed live-action folly. It became an instant cautionary tale for 30 years of nervous efforts at fusing games and movies.

No coincidence, then, that the pointedly adequate new film appears made with its baroque forebear as a blueprint of how not to do things. Or that it comes as a redemption story. We first meet the brothers, voiced by Chris Pratt and Charlie Day, as the laughing stock of their Brooklyn-Italian family. But a new start awaits in the trans-dimensional Mushroom Kingdom, where Princess Peach is alternately mooned over and menaced by lovestruck monster turtle Bowser. (They are played respectively by Anya Taylor-Joy and Jack Black, though perhaps they switched roles in the booth.)

The movie is made by Illumination, the company behind the all-conquering Minions films. At least some of the same formula is applied here: unfussy animation; endless comic sidebars with small, colourful characters; a pace that is brisk without evoking a sugar rush; a wilful lack of the meta-textual curlicues that please middle-aged film critics in screening rooms on Monday mornings. There are vapour trails of The Wizard of Oz, but if a basic boob in 1993 was straining to make cinema of a game no one involved had ever bothered playing, now the actual Mario of it all is central. Adventures unfold amid floating platforms and power-ups. The 8-bit world is faithfully reimagined for the modern under-10.

Much of this will be slightly dull for anyone else. But it can also feel refreshing when a studio children’s movie is this squarely made for actual children, rather than with one eye on the reviews. And for gaming nostalgics, something authentically sweet informs the care with which nuggets of the Mario universe are gently scattered: shuffling Shy Guys, massed Yoshis, a Karting interlude on Rainbow Road. A pale blue Luma star even voices morbid thoughts, while jailed by a Bowser consumed by jealousy over Princess Peach: a touch of sex and death, after all, for supervising adults.

★★★☆☆

In cinemas from April 7