The Super Mario Galaxy Movie Review: A Gorgeous but Hollow IP Showcase

Look, we know what we’re walking into. We gave the first Super Mario Bros. Movie a lukewarm score and got buried in the comments. Three years later, the same directorial duo of Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic and writer Matthew Fogel are back with a bigger playground. The galaxy awaits. And unfortunately, the same fundamental problem follows them into it.

To be absolutely clear about one thing before we go further: the animation in this film is a 10 out of 10. Illumination’s team is doing their best work here. The character expressions, the lighting, the way different art styles blend together across worlds — it’s genuinely jaw-dropping at times. This is some of the most technically impressive animation in years. We want to give them their full credit for that.

Everything else? That’s where we have to be honest with you.

Cotton Candy Cinema

The best way to describe The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is this: it’s a happy meal. It will make your kids happy and quiet. It has a toy in it. It tastes fine. But you know — sitting there eating it — that it’s not good food. And no amount of box office billions changes that.

The film fires on all cylinders for roughly its first 30 minutes. The opening on Rosalina’s star castle is legitimately great setup. The brothers riding motorcycles together has charm. There’s a version of this movie where you slow down, breathe a little, and build something real. Then Yoshi shows up — the character everyone was most excited to finally see in a real role after being teased in the first film — and the movie immediately squanders him. He gets a two-minute New York montage and is instantly “part of the crew.” No backstory. No arc. No reason for Toad’s bizarre hostility toward him. Just: here’s Yoshi, keep moving.

From there, the film becomes what we can only describe as Side Quest: The Movie. Our heroes fall from one world to the next, spend about ten minutes in each, reference something Nintendo fans will recognize, grab a power-up, and repeat. Every time a plot thread gets interesting — Bowser’s rehabilitation arc, the Mario and Peach romance, the brother dynamic — the film immediately drops it and cuts to the next shiny thing. At the end of this movie, no character has learned anything. Not one. Not even close.

Great Characters, Wasted Potential

Here’s the genuinely painful part: the characters themselves are actually better in this film than in the first one. Rosalina (Brie Larson) has a compelling setup as a cosmic protector separated from her sister. The Lumas — little star children — are so charming you’d watch an entire film just about them. Glen Powell’s Fox McCloud has more cool factor in his ten minutes of screen time than most characters get in full films, and we genuinely want a standalone Star Fox movie off the back of this.

But wanting something is different from getting it. Every character introduced here is essentially thrown into the mixer with fifteen others and blended into mush. Bowser Jr. (Benny Safdie) has the bones of a genuinely interesting villain arc — a kid raised on stories of galactic domination by a father who’s now trying to reform himself. That could be a whole movie. Instead it gets about four minutes of screen time and resolves with a shrug. Donald Glover’s Yoshi is adorable. He’s also essentially furniture.

Jack Black’s Bowser finally shows up around the 40-minute mark, and when he does, it feels like the film momentarily remembers it has a plot. But even Bowser — the most interesting character in the franchise’s film history at this point — gets sidelined into becoming a lackey for his own son by the third act. It makes no sense tonally, and it doesn’t earn the emotion the film is reaching for when it tries to land its father-son beats.

No Lows Means No Highs

This is the core technical problem with The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, and it’s the same problem the first film had: everything is dragged to the middle. There are no real lows. The heroes are never in genuine peril. They’re never separated long enough for you to feel the distance. They’re never scared enough for you to feel scared with them. And because there are no lows, there can be no highs. The climax lands with a thud because nothing before it built toward anything emotionally.

The kids in the theater with us weren’t laughing. They weren’t scared. They were watching — passively — the way you watch a screen saver. Colorful. Fast. Technically impressive. Completely forgettable.

Compare that to Puss in Boots: The Last Wish — a film that came out the same year as the first Mario movie, made a fraction of the money, and had children and adults alike gripping their armrests and tearing up. That’s what a genuinely great kids movie does. This is not that.

The One Moment That Worked

We’ll give credit where it’s due. Near the end of the film, when the group returns home to find a crater where the castle used to be, Luigi delivers the line “The castle died” with such perfect flat bewilderment that we both genuinely cracked up. One joke. In 99 minutes. It landed perfectly and made us realize exactly what the whole film was missing — more of that. More silly, weird, actually funny energy. The Minions movies, for all their flaws, are funnier than this. That’s a problem.

The two post-credits stingers — one teasing a surprisingly menacing star child villain, one introducing Princess Daisy — suggest the third film has somewhere interesting to go. We’ll be there. We always are. But we’re also going to tell you exactly what we think of it when we get there.