A Super Mario Galaxy Movie Review: Lots of galaxy, not enough story

Let's be honest. Nobody really needed The Super Mario Galaxy Movie to be Spirited Away. We just needed it to be good. Properly, satisfyingly good — the way its 2023 predecessor managed to be, almost against all odds. That film caught everyone off guard. It was joyful without being hollow. It had a story you could actually follow, characters you actually liked, and a momentum that felt earned rather than manufactured.

This one, unfortunately, is a different tale altogether.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie arrives with a genuinely charming premise. Mario, Luigi, Toad, Peach, and the newly introduced Yoshi end up in outer space, trying to stop the scheming Bowser Jr. — voiced by Benny Safdie — who wants to drain Princess Rosalina's power to build a planet-destroying cannon. Rosalina herself, voiced by Brie Larson, is the mother of the Lumas, a swarm of iridescent little star creatures who spend most of the film squeaking "Mama!" at her. It is, genuinely, very cute. The visuals are lush. The colour palette is the sort of thing that makes you briefly forget to think too hard about what you are watching.

And that, perhaps, is both the film's charm and its limitation.

Cute can only carry you so far. The film has all the ingredients of something special — a talented returning cast, a richer setting, a composer in Brian Tyler conducting a 70-piece orchestra through arrangements drawn from both Super Mario Galaxy games — and yet it feels a little smaller than the sum of its parts. The story rushes. It does not breathe.

Characters pop in and out as though auditioning rather than actually living in the world the film has built. Mario and Luigi, the two people whose names are quite literally in the title, spend large stretches of the film feeling oddly peripheral. Even the romance between Mario and Peach, which the first film at least nodded towards, is quietly shelved here.

To be fair — there is one moment that genuinely lands. Somewhere in the middle of all the galactic chaos, the film nods, quite deliberately, to the video game that inspired it. It is meta in the best possible way.

It was the kind of winking, self-aware gesture that reminds you there are clever people behind this thing, people who clearly love the source material. One only wishes the rest of the film trusted itself the same way.

The new additions to the cast bring their energy. Donald Glover voices Yoshi with a soft, childlike sweetness that is hard to dislike. Glen Powell and Brie Larson do what they can. But the script, by Matthew Fogel, gives everyone just enough to do that you never quite feel the absence of any one character — which is, perhaps, a rather telling thing to say.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is not a bad time at the cinema. If you have a child under ten, they will almost certainly adore it. The Lumas are adorable. Yoshi is adorable. Bowser Jr.'s little villain tantrums are, frankly, adorable. The film is warm, bright, and made with obvious affection for the franchise it comes from.

It just leaves you with the feeling that somewhere, somehow, there is an even better version of this story waiting to be told — one where the galaxy feels truly infinite, and the adventure inside it feels like it genuinely matters.

(All opinions are personal.)