“It’s a-me Mario!” is the most iconic line in the “Super Mario” franchise history. The saga, which is told through multiple video games extending through decades, released “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” on April 5, 2023. The movie, starring the voices of famous actors like Chris Pratt, Anya-Taylor Joy, and Seth Rogan, took off and broke box office records, becoming the first movie of this year to reach the one billion dollar mark at the worldwide box office. In its second week of release, the movie grossed 92.5 million dollars from 4,371 theaters. It broke records by making 86 million dollars in two weekends, the biggest ever for an animated film, surpassing the record previously held by “Frozen 2.” Additionally, Jack Black’s original song for the movie, “Peaches,” reached Billboard’s Hot 100 and amassed 6,000 downloads in its first week of being released.

The movie features all of the main characters from the hit video game, including Mario and his twin brother Luigi, Princess Peach, Bowser, Toad, and a lot of the game’s beloved side characters. The main plot of the movie follows Mario and Luigi who live in New York. The two brothers, who have a plumbing business in Brooklyn, find a manhole leak to fix. However, in the process, they are sucked into a pipe that leads to another dimension.

The twins separate and end up in two different lands, one ruled by Bowser and the other ruled by Princess Peach. Luigi gets captured by Bowser, and Bowser uses him as blackmail against Mario, who he views as his biggest competitor to marry Princess Peach. Meanwhile, Princess Peach, Toad, and Mario travel across different kingdoms to find allies to rescue Luigi and save the kingdoms that Bowser is destroying.

The movie has been met with extremely conflicted reviews with some critics saying Nintendo should not have made the movie in the first place and that it is irrelevant to the “Super Mario” franchise. Others have stated that the movie is incredibly entertaining with lots of plot twists and a sense of nostalgia that is much appreciated in animated movies.

Now, here is a spoiler-containing review. All the fights in the movie were fun to watch, including the dramatic fight between Mario and Donkey Kong and the tough showdown of Mario against Bowser. The most iconic fight was the one that kicked off the movie, which was between the snow kingdom penguins and Bowser’s army.

While the fight scenes made the audience enjoy the thrill of seeing who would come out victorious, the stand-out aspect of this movie was by far the comedy. By far the best comedic character in the movie was Lumalee, a little blue star – known in the game as a “luma” – who was introduced to us when Luigi was thrown into Bowser’s dungeon. Some have given Lumalee the nickname of “the adorably depressed blue star.” Lumalee is really only shown a few times throughout the movie as comedic relief; however, audiences say that they are actually the best character in the entire movie.

Lumalee steals every scene they are in by saying a shockingly depressing statement and making us ponder the value of existence in this world. At the end of the movie, Lumalee shows up at the ending credit scenes questioning whether or not the movie really had a happy ending or not because now everything was over and all that was left was a dark and empty void…yikes.

Besides Lumalee being the eerily adorable character that they are, the animation throughout the movie was done incredibly well and all the characters in the movie were designed adorably.

While it was not the greatest animated movie of all time nor was the plot the most well-written, it does have a lot of heartwarming and exciting moments in the film that made it a good movie. Though there are some flaws, it is an enjoyable movie to watch and a fun way to kill an hour and 32 minutes of your time. Overall, the “Super Mario Brothers” is an incredible movie with great comedic scenes, dramatic fights, and characters that legitimately make the audience question why they exist.