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While I had a ton of fun seeing this film on the big screen last year, it didn’t have the same effect on a second viewing. As a long time Mario fan, there’s still a lot here that I appreciate. From music cues to background characters to sound effects, it stays very true to the games. There’s clear effort and passion put into the references here, and plenty of the inside jokes here still put a smile on my face. However, when the film isn’t paying homage to the game series, it doesn’t really have much to offer. For the most part, the performances are really lazy. There’s a ton of clear stunt casting where they hired big names to play these characters, but they’re mostly just sticking to their normal voices and don’t do much to actually bring these characters to life. The pacing is also really awkward, it worked as an exciting theatrical experience, but watching it at home makes it clear just how fast it moves through everything. The entire story feels rushed and it doesn’t have the time to properly develop any of its plot points. At the very the start, it jumps right in and doesn’t slow down until the credits, and it makes for an exhausting experience. It’s never boring, but it made me completely apathetic to the plot and characters. Some of the music choices here are also really strange. When it uses music from the games, it can be really cool, but it also uses a lot of real life music. It always felt off hearing these popular songs in the background of a Super Mario film, and what makes it worse is how lazy the music decisions are. All of the songs here are ones that I like on their own, but they’ve all been used in a million other movies, and so it feels like there was no actual effort to choose the music for this film. Illumination is known for making bottom of the barrel childrens entertainment, and this is far from their worst or most annoying movie, but you can also frequently feel their usual bag of tricks at play. It’s not obnoxious, but it also feels like it’s leaning into the cliches of modern kids movies to an extent that feels out of place for Mario. There is a lot that this film did right. So much of the fanservice works to an extent where it’s still a movie that’s meaningful to me as a fan of the games, but as an actual movie it’s held back from truly being great.