Review: The Super Mario Bros. Movie is aimed at young kids

This big-budget animated family film inspired by the Nintendo characters that harkens back to the earlier days of computer gaming has strong appeal for a younger audience.

With big, expensive actors - Chris Pratt, Charlie Day, Anya Taylor-Joy - doing the voice work, and with a handful of generations having now grown up on these characters, it should also have strong appeal to those Gens X, Y, Millennial and Centennial who played Mario in his various forms from 8-bit to HD, many of those folk now the parents or grandparents taking their kids to see something at the movies across the Easter school holidays.

The missing ingredient for those adult audiences is any kind of wit or clever dialogue in the film's screenplay penned by Matthew Fogel - I mean the witty banter between characters in Pixar films like Ice Age or Toy Story, with layered characters and with emotionally charged stakes.

For those living under a rock since the first Mario Bros. computer game was released in 1983, players of this Nintendo game use the characters of moustachioed plumbers Mario and Luigi to walk, punch and swing their way through different worlds, swinging on vines, jumping on mushrooms and bricks and travelling through pipes to rescue a princess. In later years, the brothers were also available in go-carts and other vehicles.

What Fogel's screenplay does is honour that simple approach, constructing a simple narrative to get Mario to bashing bricks and jumping on mushrooms quickly and for much of the film.

As the film opens, Brooklyn Italian-American plumbers Mario (Pratt) and Luigi (Day) are showing off the TV ad they've shot for their new business, and this is the one moment that feels like an authentically cheeky nod back to the game's early days.

It also addresses some of the online criticism the filmmakers received casting the very Anglo Pratt and Day for the voice work, neither being particularly Italian, as the plumbers put on the thick Brooklynised Italian accents of their parents for their quirky TV ad.

They also don ridiculous coloured overalls, caps and gloves for the ad, giving context for these real-world human characters to look like video game characters.

Heading into the subterranean levels under the Brooklyn streets to get to the bottom of some localised flooding, the brothers are sucked into a portal to an alternate dimension but are quickly separated with Luigi trapped in a cage in the world of evil turtle emperor Bowser (Jack Black) while Mario is in the kingdom of Princess Peach (Taylor-Joy).

At my session of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, I sat in front of a school group on excursion, probably grade 4 or 5, and absolutely the demographic for this film. Those kids giggled the whole way through this film and they loved the absolute heck out of it, particularly Black's two musical numbers, so, critical interpretation aside, kids will love this film, and what the heck do I know?

But that screenplay is particularly disappointing and will be to older audiences who are looking for a little nuance. Visually, though, the film is glorious and colourful and directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic set up fun and familiar action scenes those kids in my audience responded positively to.

As disappointed as I was in this film, it is still head-and-shoulders above the 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie. Now that was bad.