Eli Friedberg

The Super Mario Bros. Movie isn’t an actively unpleasant way to spend an afternoon, but the glib literalism with which it applies cinematic narrative to video games’ abstractions can’t hold a candle to the wrenching pathos and self-discovery of a night on the track with real-life loved ones and Mario in his original medium.

It’s a familiar traced sketch of 20th century imagined dystopias, but Gen-Z trappings evocative of our own looming dystopia offer a slightly new shade of color. It just isn’t vivid enough.

It’s not a disaster, just a lukewarm bellyflop, and a series of X-Men’s loudness and longevity deserves more.

The film has, figuratively and literally, somehow even less gravity than its source material and predecessor. The visual language is divorced from reality and referent to the games; even Looney Tunes action is grounded in the real world—the better to subvert it.

Blomkamp, one suspects, does not possess the same imagination for interior worlds he’s exhibited for external. Demonic largely proves this thesis correct.

The film at once wrings this premise for whimsical absurdism and slow-burn suspense, on each side vulgarizing the memory of the Holocaust.