Review: 'The Super Mario Bros. Movie' can't, or won't, give Nintendo's trademark plumber a distinctive personality

Is it possible that, 30 years later, we — and by “we,” I mean the vast moviegoing and video game-playing public — owe John Leguizamo and the late Bob Hoskins an apology?

Hoskins and Leguizamo took so much criticism, from 1993 until now, for their participation in “Super Mario Bros.,” a weirdly dark live-action comedy based on the Nintendo franchise. But watching the latest attempt to put the Italian plumber brothers on the big screen, in Illumination’s animated “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” it seems the fault lies elsewhere — like the source material.

Don’t get me wrong. I played the arcade games — “Donkey Kong” in high school, and “Mario Bros.” in college — and have spent time playing “Mario Kart” with my family (I’m reliably the worst racer among us). And I’ve watched my sons play so many of the games (“Super Mario Bros. 3,” “Super Mario World,” “Super Mario 64,” “Super Mario Sunshine,” “New Super Mario Bros.,” “New Super Mario Bros. Wii,” the two “Super Mario Galaxy” games, the six “Paper Mario” games, “Super Mario 3D Land,” “New Super Mario Bros. U,” “Super Mario 3D World,” “Super Mario RPG,” “Super Mario Maker,” “Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker” and “Super Mario Odyssey”). So I understand, admire and have, at times, loved the gargantuan franchise that Nintendo has developed over the last four decades.

But transferring the high-jumping game play of Mario and Luigi, and inserting a bunch of game references in the place where a plot might go, is not enough to carry a movie — even with a legion of Mario fans willing to cut the filmmakers a break.

The thin script, by Matthew Fogel (who wrote Illumination’s “Minions: The Rise of Gru”), centers on Mario and Luigi, a pair of Brooklyn plumbers struggling to get their business off the ground. While trying to fix a broken water line, the brothers discover a secret portal — a green pipe, of course — and are sucked into another dimension. 

Luigi (voiced by Charlie Day) ends up in the Dark Lands, where the monstrous turtle king, Bowser (voiced by Jack Black), reigns through fear and dripping lava. Mario (voiced by Chris Pratt) lands in the Mushroom Kingdom, where the loyal Toad (voiced by Keegan-Michael Key) introduces him to the kingdom’s leader, Princess Peach (voiced by Anya Taylor-Joy).

(A word about Pratt, who raised the ire of Nintendo fans when his casting was announced. He’s an OK choice to portray Mario, a bland voice for a bland hero. Only in a self-parodying opening, thankfully, do Pratt and Day put on phony Italian accents. Charles Martinet, the longtime voice of Mario and Luigi in the games, shows up to voice the plumbers’ dad, so diehard fans get a taste of the classic interpretation.)

Bowser has stolen a Super Star and aims to use it to woo Peach into marriage — a proposal Peach would refuse. Peach instead asks Mario to help enlist the aid of Cranky Kong (voiced by Fred Armisen), the leader of the ape army. To do so, Mario must battle Cranky’s son, the necktie-wearing, barrel-throwing Donkey Kong (voiced by Seth Rogen).

The movie’s directors, Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic, are responsible for developing Cartoon Network’s “Teen Titans Go!,” so they know how to get laughs out of well-established franchise characters. Here, they stage unsubtle references to the games — like an early run through Brooklyn that resembles the side-scrolling of the early “Super Mario Bros.” — for the grown-up franchise fans, while splashing colors onto the scenery to keep the younger audiences’ attention. But the only thing that’s really funny is a running gag with an imprisoned Luma who talks in depressing, existential terms.

“The Super Mario Bros. Movie” is caught in a no-win situation, limited by the demands of Nintendo not to mess with the company’s main character — its version of Mickey Mouse — by giving it any emotional contours. In the games, we are Mario, and that prevents the filmmakers from giving him a personality of his own.

——

‘The Super Mario Bros. Movie’

★1/2

Opens Wednesday, April 5, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for action and mild violence. Running time: 92 minutes.

Review: 'Dungeons & Dragons' movie reboot gives off the right kind of wacky energy

The folks behind the fantasy action comedy “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” made one exceedingly smart decision early on: They hired a couple of comedy guys to direct the movie. It’s a decision that pays handsome dividends throughout this fun, engaging movie.

Those directors are Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, who previously collaborated on the bitingly funny “Game Night.” In turning the Hasbro-owned role-playing game into a movie — and not mucking it up, as happened famously with the 2000 movie with Jeremy Irons — Goldstein and Daley, with co-writer Michael Gilio, realize that to make this work, they can’t take much of it seriously.

That’s why the emphasis is on the comical pairing of two veteran thieves: The garrulous, lute-playing Edgin Darvis (Chris Pine) and the hard-bitten Holga Kilgore (Michelle Rodriguez), who lead a group of thieves on a series of capers — until they get caught in a trap, and are sent to the kingdom’s prison. Edgin is also a bard, so talking their way out of prison is part of the game.

Back in the kingdom, Edgin and Holga discover that one of their criminal cohort, the conman Forge Fitzwilliam (Hugh Grant), is now set himself up as a lord. What’s more, he’s become the guardian of Elgin’s daughter, Kira (Chloe Coleman), and turned her against her dad. Oh, and there’s the extra bit where Forge has made an alliance with Sofina (Daisy Head), without knowing that she’s a Red Wizard, using her magic to her own nasty ends.

To rescue Kira, thwart Forge and stop Sofina from destroying the world, Elgin and Holga need a team. They find Simon Aumar (Justice Smith), a sorcerer with a self-confidence problem; Doric (Sophia Lillis), a druid who can change into animals; and Xenk Yendar (Regé-Jean Page), a paladin who’s fighting prowess is matched only by his chivalrous seriousness.

Even if you’ve never rolled a 20-sided die in your life, there’s plenty to connect with in this movie — mostly because the cast is so sharp. Pine is a dashing hero, and even better when he’s playing a somewhat jaded one. Rodriguez shows a comic side not employed much in the “Fast & Furious” franchise (there’s a bit with a secret cameo that’s hilarious). And Grant plays the cad better than anybody.

Goldstein and Daley keep the jokes and the action running in tandem, and add just enough emotional weight — like Edgin’s concern for his daughter — to make it all not seem too frivolous. They also pull enough from the game that D&D players will have a ball collecting all the Easter eggs. 

“Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” manages the neat trick of taking a property that has been hard to transfer to movies and finding the humor and heart in it. I’m actually looking forward to the franchise possibilities.

——

‘Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, March 31, at theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for fantasy action/violence and some language. Running time: 134 minutes.

Review: 'A Thousand and One' is a gut punch of a movie, a searing drama about a woman's harrowing search for a home

Nearly overspilling with heartfelt emotion, writer-director A.V. Rockwell’s feature debut “A Thousand and One” is a gut-wrenching drama of a woman’s desperation and a child’s blossoming against the odds.

The story starts in 1994, in New York City at the beginning of the Rudy Giuliani era. Inez (played by singer/actress Teyana Taylor) is just released from Riker’s Island, and eager to get her life back on track. Part of that involves getting 6-year-old Terry (played by Aaron Kingsley Adetola) out of foster care and setting up a home in Harlem. Inez plucks Terry without going through the proper legal channels — which includes obtaining a fake birth certificate and Social Security number, so Terry can enroll in school under a new name.

After a rough start, with Inez and Terry losing their tempers at each other, they find some temporary accommodations — first with Inez’s friend Kim (Terri Abney), whose mother (Delissa Reynolds) is none too happy about the situation, and later in a boarding house of sorts run by Miss Annie (played by Tony winner Adriane Lenox). Eventually, Inez finds an apartment that they can find home.

Not long after, Inez invites her man, Lucky (Will Catlett), also a recent resident at Riker’s, to be the third member of the household. It’s a rough beginning, as Lucky and Terry — who has always had questions about who or where his father is — slowly warm to each other.

The story jumps ahead to 2001, and later to 2005, with Aven Courtney and Josiah Cross playing Terry at 13 and 17, respectively. During this span, Rockwell depicts how Harlem is changing — first with Giuliani’s stop-and-frisk policing and later with Michael Bloomberg prodding the neighborhood toward gentrification — and, with it, both Terry’s and Inez’s futures are thrown into upheaval.

Rockwell — who directed a short (“Feathers”) that played Sundance in 2019 and made a Super Bowl ad with Serena Williams (for Bumble) — makes a ferociously assured debut as a feature director. (Not for nothing did the movie win the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Dramatic films back in January.) Rockwell reassembles Harlem of the ‘90s and aughts with just a few brushstrokes, while keeping laser focus on the intense human story in the foreground. The pacing, the twisty plot, and the dialogue all point to a filmmaker with a strong voice and a sensitive ear.

“A Thousand and One” is also a showcase for Taylor, who’s also known as a singer, choreographer and music-video director who has worked with Beyonce, Kanye West and Missy Elliot, among others. (She also is the youngest-ever winner of “The Masked Singer.”) Taylor gives a stellar performance as Inez, who hustles to make money to give Terry a better life, and doesn’t back down when anyone challenges her on her mothering skills.

Together, Rockwell gives Taylor the platform from which she can shine as Inez, and Taylor gives Rockwell the spark to make her words sing. “A Thousand and One” is the sort of movie we’ll look back on, for both director and star, and say we saw them when they were just getting started.

——

‘A Thousand and One’

★★★★

Opens March 31, in theaters. Not rated, but probably R for language. Running time: 117 minutes.

——

This review originally appeared on this site on January 29, 2023, when the movie premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Enys Men' is a singular work of folk horror, confounding and fascinating in equal measure

There are a handful of filmmakers — David Lynch and Alex Garland leap to mind — who can produce visually arresting and narratively confounding movies that unsettle the viewer’s mind. With the creepy curiosity “Enys Men,” filmmaker Mark Jenkin might be joining those ranks.

From the dialogue-free images Jenkin delivers in the early going, viewers will glean some information. It’s 1973, near a rocky coastline (the movie was filmed in Cornwall), and a solitary wildlife volunteer (played by Mary Woodbine) has a daily routine. She walks from the cottage to a cliffside, observes a clump of white flowers, walks back to the cottage, and records her observations and the ground temperature around the flowers. Then she fires up her generator so she can heat up a pot of tea and answer her two-way radio, then goes to bed by candlelight.

As days turn into weeks, though, the volunteer starts seeing things. A young woman (Flo Crowe) in the cottage. A mysterious boatman (Edward Rowe). A choir of young girls. And a row of lichen sprouting from a scar across her belly. A fulminating preacher (played by Mary Woodvine’s father, English character actor John Woodbine).

Does it make sense? Not always. But on a subconscious level, the juxtaposition of these images creates an atmosphere of folk horror — more mythology than narrative.

Jenkin is director, screenwriter, cinematographer, film editor, sound editor and composer, so his vision is undiluted. The result is a raw, film that gets past a viewer’s defenses and burrows under one’s skin.

——

‘Enys Men’

★★★

Opens Friday, March 31, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for some nudity, a moment of sexual content, and some bloodshed. Running time: 91 minutes.

Review: 'John Wick: Chapter 4' raises the stakes, the body count, and the frenetic pace of it all.

As anyone who has watched one of the three previous “John Wick” movie in the last nine years knows, the new “John Wick: Chapter 4” will rise and fall on four elements, listed here from least important to most important:

• The storyline.

• Keanu Reeves’ performance.

• The world-building.

• The choreography of the fight scenes.

Happily, Reeves and director Chad Stahelski, who have been partners in crime all through the franchise, deliver in all four departments, producing the most satisfying installment since the first movie.

Reeves’ John Wick has a new enemy this go-round: The Marquis (played by Bill Skarsgård), who aims to not just kill Wick but destroy anything that he has touched — starting with the New York branch of The Continental, the hotel chain of choice for international assassins. The Marquis spares the life of Winston (Ian McShane), The Continental’s New York manager and a sometime ally of Wick.

Wick tries to call upon the few friends he has left. He goes to Osaka, where the manager of The Continental branch, Shimazu (Hiroyuki Sanada), owes Wick a debt of honor. When The Marquis’ men attack the Osaka hotel, Wick starts fighting back, aided by Shimazu and his daughter, Akira (played by the pop star Rina Sawayama) — in a cascade of stunt work and mayhem that is as bloody as it is beautiful.

Wick’s blood-splattered trail takes him from Osaka to Berlin and, in the shattering conclusion, to Paris. Two men are also following Wick: His friend and sometimes nemesis, the blind swordsman Caine (Donnie Yen), and a man known only as Tracker (Shamier Anderson), who is adept in many weapons, but none more effective than his dog.

The Marquis is acting on behalf of the High Table, the shadowy rulers of the assassin world, who want Wick to pay for his crimes of killing the Table’s members without permission. With help from Winston and the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne), Wick may have an out — by challenging someone from the High Table, in this case The Marquis, to a duel.

The script, by Shay Hatten (who’s writing the “John Wick” spinoff “Ballerina”) and Michael Finch, hops around a bit, in its efforts to put Wick in more places to kill more helmeted guards. The script’s best dialogue is given to Yen’s Caine — who intones at one point, “the only way John Wick will ever have freedom and peace is in death” — and McShane’s droll one-liners as Winston. But most fascinating is how the movie plants more rules for how the High Table administers justice.

Reeves pushes himself physically, like a veteran dancer, through some really good set pieces — particularly in the Paris scenes, which include a gun battle around the Arc de Triomphe and a fight on a ridiculously long set of stairs.

“John Wick: Chapter 4” is the longest movie in the franchise. But the fight scenes are so kinetic, so recklessly energetic and just so much fun that the three hours fly by like so many bullets whizzing past Wick’s head. I don’t know if Reeves and Stahelski are going to make another one of these, but they’d have trouble topping the entertaining mayhem of this installment.

——

‘John Wick: Chapter 4’

★★★1/2

Opening Friday, March 24, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for pervasive strong violence and some language. Running time: 169 minutes.

Review: In 'Return to Seoul,' a woman searches for identity in a movie that never goes where you expect

For a quiet movie, writer-director Davy Chou’s “Return to Seoul” roils up some powerful emotions in its telling of a young woman’s search for her birth parents and her own self-identity.

Frédérique Benoit, who goes by Freddie (played by Park Ji-min), was born in South Korea but was adopted by a French couple when she was a baby — and has been raised as a modern French woman. At 25, she makes an unexpected vacation trip to Seoul, where she parties with her new friend Tena (Guka Han) and some local twenty-somethings, and then goes to the adoption agency that most likely handled her case.

The adoption agency is under strict rules about contacting biological parents. The agency will send a telegram to the biological parent’s home address, and wait to hear if there’s a reply. After three telegrams, the agency cannot send another one for a year. 

When Freddie asks the agency to make contact, she gets a response from her biological father (Oh Kwang-rok). This leads to an uncomfortable family reunion, where Freddie and Tena not only meet the biological father, but his wife, his sister and his mother. Dad talks about Freddie staying to live with him permanently — which freaks Freddie enough that she and Tena get on the first bus back to Seoul.

Chou’s screenplay — which he wrote based on the life of his friend, Laure Badufle (who is credited as a script consultant) — takes a couple of timeline leaps, catching Freddie at later parts of her life. She goes through some changes, in occupation and attitude, but is still trying to sort out her relationship to the people and the place of her earliest days on Earth. 

Chou’s unembellished script never goes where you expect — and neither does Park Ji-min’s incredible performance. Acting in her first movie, Park captures the spectrum of conflicting emotions that Freddie is dealing with as she navigates the questions of her birth and where she will land in the divide between her Korean ancestry and her French upbringing. It’s a jagged, fiercely honest performance, one that resonates with anyone who’s asked themselves who they are in the world.

——

‘Return to Seoul’

★★★1/2

Opening Friday, March 24, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for brief drug use, nudity and language. Running time: 115 minutes; in French and Korean, with subtitles.

Review: Zach Braff's drama 'A Good Person' has moments of elegance and emotion, but also times where the phoniness takes over.

There’s been talk lately about whether AI programs could write a workable screenplay, given the right prompts — but I argue that it’s already happened, and someone typed the words “Zach Braff” and “addiction drama” into a computer, and the script for “A Good Person” popped out.

Braff wrote and directed this heavy drama — and if you’re at all familiar with his unfairly maligned 2004 comedy-drama “Garden State,” the movie that helped invent the “manic pixie dream girl,” you aren’t surprised by Braff’s name in the end credits here.

Florence Pugh stars as Allison, who first appears to be a prototypical “manic pixie dream girl.” She plays piano and sings, and she has cool New York friends, all of whom show up for her engagement party — to celebrate her impending marriage to the super-nice Nathan (Chinaza Uche). 

Then, as she’s driving with Nathan’s sister, Molly (Nichelle Hines), and Molly’s husband, Jesse (Toby Onwumere), she looks at the map on her phone for a second — and looks up to see a backhoe lurching out into traffic. The crash kills Molly and Jesse, and leaves Allison dealing with pain and guilt.

Move forward a year, and Allison isn’t the “dream girl” any more. She’s more like the depressed, screwed-up character Braff played in “Garden State.” She’s physically recovered from the car crash, but the emotional damage is still insurmountable — as is the opioid addiction she has developed from the pain pills she took after the accident. She’s living with her mom, Diane (Molly Shannon), and long since cut off her engagement to Nathan.

Realizing that she’s hit rock bottom, Allison works up the nerve to find and attend a meeting for addicts. As soon as she enters the room, though, she sees the last person she wants to see: Nathan and Molly’s father, Daniel (played by Morgan Freeman, who worked with Braff in 2017’s “Going in Style”). When Allison tries to run away, it’s Daniel — who has been sober 10 years, but keeps a bottle of whiskey hidden to test his resolve — who convinces her to stay. 

And, just like that, we’re in a drama about addiction, recovery and relapse. Braff, who can be a sensitive screenwriter, manages to steer clear of the clichés common to addiction-themed movies. Unfortunately, he steps into other traps, including the painfully earnest plot device of making Daniel a model-train hobbyist — and thus letting Freeman deliver an opening narration about “a world where the neighbors are always kind, the lovers always end up together, and the trains always take you to the far-off places you always swore you’d go.”

Though Braff’s story hits all the stations of the cross in Allison’s road to redemption, there are some bright spots. The standout is Celeste O’Connor (“Freaky”), playing Molly’s teen daughter Ryan, now living with Daniel and testing his revived parenting skills — as well as overcoming her resentment at Allison entering their life.

“A Good Person” veers between moments of genuine feeling and moments of phony schmaltz — and ends up delivering more of the fake stuff than the real thing. 

——

‘A Good Person’

★★1/2

Opening Friday, March 24, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for drug abuse, language throughout and some sexual references. Running time: 129 minutes.

Review: 'The Tutor' is a nonsensical thriller with a twist ending that's ridiculously bad

It’s surprising that “The Tutor” didn’t end up in the less-traveled end of a Netflix queue — because if idiotic psychological thrillers like this one escape their natural habitat, what are streaming services good for?

When we meet Ethan Campbell (Garrett Hedlund), he’s a hard-working rent-a-tutor helping rich New York teen-agers get through their SATs. When he’s not working, he’s setting up house with his pregnant girlfriend, Annie (Victoria Justice), in an apartment no gig worker could afford in a million years. (New York City is portrayed by interiors in Birmingham, Alabama, and a lot of Big Apple stock footage.) 

When Ethan’s boss (Joseph Castillo-Midyett) calls with an irresistible offer — tutoring a super-rich teen in the suburbs at three times his regular rate — Ethan thinks about the impending costs of having a baby and says yes. Ethan is driven, by chauffeur, to a mansion, where he finds his new student, Jackson (played by “Stranger Things” co-star Noah Schlapp).

Ethan is duly impressed by Jackson’s ostentatious wealth, and creeped out by Jackson’s demeanor — which swings from boredom about his lessons to self-destructive anger about getting an answer wrong. When Ethan goes looking for Jackson and instead finds the teen’s laptop, with a folder full of surveillance photos of Ethan and Annie in the city, Ethan’s rating of Jackson goes from mildly creepy to full-on psychotic.

More plot elements pop up in Ryan King’s first produced screenplay, namely the mention of a woman who died under mysterious circumstances 10 years earlier. King’s script and Jordan Ross’s direction keeps spiraling toward the most ludicrous plot twist I’ve seen in a long time.

Here’s the thing about twist endings: For one to work, a viewer must be able to watch the movie a second time and see the signs that were missed on first viewing. It doesn’t matter how outlandish the premise of the twist. What matters is whether it can be made plausible. And there’s nothing in “The Tutor,” particularly in Ethan’s actions, that seem remotely believable if one pieces them together mentally after the big reveal.

Hobbling the film even more is that Ross, as a director, seems to create zero rapport among his three leads — so we’re never invested in anything they say or do. “The Tutor” shows that its filmmakers need to go back for some remedial film school classes.

——

‘The Tutor’

★

Opens Friday, March 24, at some theaters. Rated R for language, some violence and sexual material. Running time: 92 minutes.