I have now seen the thing.
What the hell did I just watch? Was this even a movie? It felt like one right up until they arrived in the Mushroom Kingdom, and after that it was like reading some eight-year-old's fanfiction where every single sentence is "And then Mario did so-and-so just like in the video game." There were a couple moments where something happened that was clearly meant to be a reference to one of the games I haven't seen, and instead of being entertained I was just like "Oh, is that something that happens in one of the games? OK, I guess." I can only imagine that the whole movie was like that for anyone who's even less familiar with the games than I am. Making a world that works 1:1 like a video game is not good worldbuilding or storytelling. Even the writers of Wreck-It Ralph, that was set literally inside a bunch of actual video games, knew that. Nor is adhering so rigidly to the way things work in the source material how you're supposed to do an adaptation. In fact, out of all the bad video game movies out there, I'm not aware of any of them having this particular problem.
And what's extra weird is that, again, while they were still in Brooklyn, it felt like it was going somewhere decent. The references were clever and used well. The sequence where they went through a construction site and it was like a 2D Mario level, complete with a pole and "castle" at the end was corny but so well-executed I had to laugh. The scene where he game-overs in Kid Icarus and the "I'M FINISHED" is clearly meant to echo what he's thinking about his career? Brilliant. (It reminded me of that one scene from Megamind where he says "I can explain!" just as the NO YOU CAN'T poster is in the background.) I was genuinely shocked to learn that this movie has only one credited writer.
I've heard that, as loose as Mario's canon is and how little regard Miyamoto has for storytelling in games, he also has this laundry list of arbitrary rules that all the games have to follow, and that it leads to clashes with the writers and designers of the RPG spinoff games. I wonder if that was partly the problem here too, or if it was mostly a lack of imagination on Illumination's part—who, as I've mentioned before, are generally not good at making movies.
What I will blame on Illumination is how little time Mario gets to actually interact with anything in the Mushroom Kingdom proper. Instead we get the most uninteresting travel montage I've ever seen and then, boom, we're in Donkey Kong Country instead. And then Rainbow Road. (And by the way, how the hell do you make a Super Mario Bros. movie where Mario's sole interaction with any of the enemies from the games is during a go-karting scene?) And then we're already at Bowser's Castle. Bowser's "invasion", for that matter, barely amounts to anything either; he just sets up shop somewhere on the outskirts (I guess? It's not really clear where his castle came from; I guess he had his minions remodel the Penguins'?) and then more or less waits for Mario and Peach to come to him.
And yeah, Peach's reaction to his proposal was awkward and unnatural. The proper response to being proposed to by a seven-foot turtle monster who just invaded your kingdom is something more like "......WHAT????"
Oh, and Hollywood really needs to stop pretending that Jack Black is a good songwriter. He was amusing during that brief period when it was refreshing to hear any sort of novelty songs written by a guy not named Yankovic, and when that someone being a real Hollywood celebrity posting material on the internet (OMG he's a nerd just like us!) was doubly shocking. Yes, we get it, he can be funny and carry a tune and play an instrument; that doesn't mean we need to shoehorn whatever ditty he improv'd during the recording session into the movie and then build a whole marketing campaign out of it.
