Animated / Family
2026 / 97 minutes
Rating: 6/10

What they say about sequels never being as good as the original bears out here. Plumbers Mario and Luigi are back, and this time they are fighting not just Bowser but his son, Bowser Jr. too, and they are rescuing not just one princess but two.

If the story’s a little stale, there’s still plenty of surprises of the “easter egg” variety. This film is less about the plot than it is about the guest appearances sprinkled throughout – characters pop up from all over the Mario gaming universe, and even beyond.

The new villain, Bowser Jr., is motivated by a fierce father-hunger, and wants to impress his long-absent dad by destroying the universe. To do so, he needs some magic princess power, so he kidnaps Princess Rosalina – another  new character who wasn’t in the original, but who turns out to be Princess Peach’s long-lost older sister.

The good guys get a couple of dinosaur additions to help them along the way – the very cute Yoshi, and then a miniaturized T-Rex, who, in his mini state, turns out to be pretty cute too. Everything is cuter when it’s smaller, including Bowser, whose rants and death threats are hard to take seriously when, for a good chunk of the movie, he’s just six inches tall.

It’s up to Mario and Luigi, Yoshi and the two princesses to save the day, and if it’s going to take an endless series of chase and fight scenes to do it, well, then that is just what will have to happen!

Cautions

The overall caution would be “weirdness.” Bowser gets chucked into lava and re-emerges as a skeletal version of himself. So, it’s nice that he didn’t die – this is a kid’s movie after all – but weird to have him unperturbed about his skeletal form. It’s weird that Bowser Jr. has a dad but no mom. Weird too that Princess Peach and Princess Rosalina have no parents at all. And that Princess Rosalina somehow has stars as children… who have no father. But maybe that’s what you get when you turn a video game – or a bunch of video games – into a movie: you get a story that has lots of action, but little coherence.

There might be a bit of today’s gender-reality-denying “girl-power” ethos on display here with the two princesses, Peach and Rosalina, much stronger than the two male heroes, Luigi and Mario. But, like everything else in this goofy universe, it’s hard to take too seriously.

Another bit of very brief weirdness: the nihilistic floating blue star from the first film makes a post-credit appearance, telling the imprisoned villains that we all turn to dust, and there’s no escaping the “approaching drumbeats of death.” I have no idea why this is included; it doesn’t match anything else in the movie. So, a good reason to hit the stop button once the credits roll to just skip this last, extremely weird note.

Conclusion

I had a hard time rating this one. This is a pretty straightforward story so what makes it special is all the nods to the dozens of games this is based on, and the sometimes rapid-fire appearances of those games’  hundreds of different characters. How the producers fit them all in is amazing, so there’s a lot of cleverness to appreciate. The appeal here is the same as in the first – there’s a real nostalgia to watching Mario and Luigi and remembering childhood hours spent fighting weird and wacky monsters alongside your cousins or siblings. Part of that nostalgia is related to just how many Christian families had Nintendo systems, as compared to SEGA or PlayStation, because Nintendo had proven to be pretty safe, at least in the late 1980s and early 90s, when the Mario world began. There were all sorts of quirky characters – and downright weird ones, like the many walking skeletons – but no blood spattering violence, or anything even remotely sexual. It was good, clean fun that dads could join in on too, if they didn’t mind losing to their kids. Good times!

But if you didn’t play the games, then this is just one loud, bright, frantic mess, with not much of a plot to enjoy, and just so many flashing lights going off again and again. Then it’s not worth bothering with.

So… an 8 for someone who loved the games, but more like a 5 for someone who’s never played them. Even for fans, this isn’t going to be a film they’ll want to see again and again. To get that dose of nostalgia, they’ll revisit the first, not this sequel. So I’m going to slot it in a notch below the original, and give this a 6.

But if you liked the original, and are looking for a bit more of the same – loud, bright, basically safe, nostalgic fun – then this will tick all the boxes. It’s not great… but it ain’t bad.