Topic: The Super Mario Bros. Movie 2

"Yeah I'm a tryhard videogame elitist. How did you know???" ahh🥀💔

@MrHorse Bruv if you can't disagree with me without talking about the movie itself to the extent you are having to literally make up quotes about other things then maybe the movie wasn't all that good anyway.

Maybe depends on your standards but I think 7/10 is exactly right. I can't entirely disagree with those saying it's just a succession of Mario references and bright colours, but it does that well enough to be a very fun 90 minutes. But there's also just something inherently funny to me about Bowser singing a ballad so maybe I'm just easily amused.

I hope (though I know it's unlikely) that professor E. Gadd appears in the movie in some way considering that bowser.jr has his paintbrush.

If you want to know my standards I gave Detective Pikachu a 6/10, which would've been a 5 if I wasn't a Pokemon fan.

@kkslider5552000 I'd probably agree with that. Detective Pikachu is kind of more interesting conceptually, it's pretty out-there for the first live-action Pokemon film, but I didn't find it all that memorable. Mario Movie is more or less exactly what you'd expect from an adaptation of a borderline plotless platformer series, but it was more entertaining than Detective Pikachu to me. Although that may be influenced by the fact I saw Mario on the big screen, or just that it has the advantage of being animated.

@MrHorse I agree. As cheesy as it was and how it was so fetched from the game there is a certain charm to it even after all these years. Besides where else are you going to see a drunk Bob Hoskins?

You didn't get the joke but whatever.

Well I did finally watch the first movie. It was...kinda exactly what I thought it was gonna be? Roughly half of it was a decently charming Mario movie, the other half was mediocre kids movie nonsense.

I think the best thing I can say is that the bad parts of the movie are still kinda bad, but I was much less annoyed by those parts than I expected. Like I knew the licensed music and I was expecting another Suicide Squad 2016 where I'm just incredibly angry at the cynical use of boringly obvious song choices. Worst part of that movie and its not even close, what does Croc have to do with Fortunate Son? Awful. Nothing in this movie made particularly mad or annoying or miserably boring, so it could've been so much worse.

But the writing was so lacking so often. It's lazy to call things lazy but I can't imagine how there would be a lot of time put into making genuinely witty and charming lines. Why was the "coming out of my shell" line considered to be bad in-universe? It's not any worse than any comedic line in this movie? There are honestly jokes that feel like they had notably less effort than this incredibly obvious pun. And so much of it was just...nothing. And there's so much good writing in modern kids' shows, and you look at movies like Puss in Boots 2 or the last Spiderverse, ocean of difference, not just a substantial one, an entire ocean, so I don't think its unreasonable for this movie made for children to have done better at this.

And that's ultimately a shame because there's a lot I liked in this movie. It would be incredibly easy for me to have been a fan of it I dare say. Because I love Mario, and despite being cynical about the...early 2010s era of over-relying on retro Mario references, visually, as a nostalgia fest, it was actually decently charming and fun. Most of the voice acting was pretty good (though I am upset that Chris Pratt COULD play Mario as the commercials in the movie (and certain other lines) prove, they were just scared of him not being brand recognizable enough without his normal voice). As a Mario adventure romp, it mostly really worked. And as much as the series isn't considered to be story driven, the Mario RPGs reliably proved you could pull it off, and with genuinely good, fun writing. There's already plenty of examples there, and I think its just funny to see Nintendo writers do so much better than Hollywood writers. But like if they're not able to be that funny, and I wish anyone making any media for kids knew this, they don't have to be endless jokes? I think a 10 year old will just get into a fun, colorful, adventure movie without needing to be constantly interrupted by jokes as yet another example of "what people who hate Marvel movies think all Marvel movies are", especially when it feels like they just do the bare minimum to get them all in.

Anyway that's my thoughts. Ok movie, hope they can improve on it like the Sonic movie sequels apparently have been able to do.

I’m really excited for Yoshi to team up with Bowser. Yoshi being a villain has been something I’ve been theorizing about in the series as a whole, so this should be really exciting and even more evidence for my case!