After much anticipation and a flurry of pushback, “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” is here in theaters, having premiered on Wednesday with Chris Pratt voicing the titular role of the plumber who travels through pipes from the classic Nintendo video game franchise.
Ever since Pratt’s casting was announced in September of 2021, there has been some vocal dissent online, mainly from the camp of gamer purists who felt Mario’s longtime official voice in the games – provided by actor Charles Martinet – should have gotten the honor. There were others who wanted the role of the Italian plumber to, in fact, go to an Italian.
In the end, Pratt’s voicing of the hero is one of the least noticeable parts of the new movie… but at first, viewers might be led to feel otherwise.
Right at the top of the animated film, Pratt’s Mario – alongside his brother Luigi (voiced by Charlie Day) – watch a TV ad they completed for their plumbing business in Brooklyn, New York, and their Italian accents in the kitschy spot are incredibly heavy-handed, to say the least.
Afterward, however, Pratt and Day revert to a mostly bland, kind of macro Italo-Brooklyn accent for the rest of the movie, with Mario even asking while analyzing the ad’s merits, “Was the accent too much?”
From then on, the only time his Mario seems to harken to the undeniably charming soundbites the character is famous for in the actual video games (think, “It’s a-me, Marrrio!”) is when he’s getting knocked out by a bad guy and the action suddenly switches to slow motion.
The super brothers’ family, however, remains firmly Italian, with actors Rino Romano, John DiMaggio and Jessica DiCicco playing their uncles and mother, respectively. And Martinet, at least, does get the plum voice role of Mario and Luigi’s father.
As for the rest of the film, it’s a rather straightforward adventure story, but one that sadly eschews many opportunities for direct references to the classic and nostalgic “Super Mario” video game stable in favor of shiny new world-building.
Sure, there are Easter eggs galore – along with some finely-tuned meta moments like when Mario is seen playing a video game himself – but in the end, Nintendo enthusiasts and casual fans alike might be left asking, “Is it really a-you, Marrrio?”
