Video game fans in general seem quite appreciative of the latest wave of video game movies. They’re slavishly devoted to their inspirations’ iconography and gameplay, and seem to have built their stories out of the same dynamics that take you level to level with the barest connective tissue between sequences. That’s certainly the case with Illumination’s
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie which, unlike the
Sonic’s attempts to build actual movies out of the run-fast simplicity of the side-scrolling games, is content to build out settings and characters first and foremost. It returns us to the Mushroom Kingdom where Princess Peach and Toad go off to search outer space for the missing Princess Rosalia. In their absence, Mario and Luigi are supposed to take care of the castle. Wouldn’t you know it? That’s when Bowser Jr attacks and knocks them into a cosmic journey of their own. The movie was clearly worked out backwards from which places and peoples from the Nintendo world the filmmakers wanted to highlight. Here’s a spaceport. Here’s a casino shaped like a cube in which every side has its own gravity. (That one’s kinda neat.) Here’s a giant bee. Here’s a hellish amusement park. There’s no rhyme nor reason to the stops on the journey, and rather than building characters arcs or dramatic tension or adventurous momentum, it accumulates a sense of just one thing after another. It even weirdly skimps on the first film’s most popular element — Jack Black’s Bowser. He gets an undernourished plot and the only time he’s even close to singing a song to follow up his absurdly popular “Peaches,” the movie cuts him off for a joke. Still, the movie is quickly paced and easy to look at. It has the rounded edges and pleasant colors and Pavlovian sound effects that’ll flatter fans of all ilks.
A far more unpleasant experience is
Mortal Kombat II, which once again saves for the very end everyone’s favorite part of the game—the theme song. The journey there is bone-headedly simple. The Mortal Kombat tournament starts up again. Several challengers have to outlast a guy with a big hammer. None do. Until one does. For fans of the classic arcade fighting game that might be enough to see the character strut out in live action again. But for a franchise that’s indebted to both cheap-o Hollywood fantasy filmmaking and vintage Hong Kong fighting pictures, this entry is woefully under imagined. Despite adding Karl Urban to play fan favorite Cage, the characters in this sequel to a reboot might as well be a flat pile of pixels. The choreography feels perfunctory and repetitive. The escalations and resolutions of the fights feel arbitrary. And every sequence appears to have been shot on a tiny set in which almost everything on the frame, including parts of the actors, is some sort of digital effect. It’s so flat and claustrophobic that even the typical ponderous exposition about the fate of the world feels small. It makes one yearn for the comparatively classical cornball charms of the original Paul W.S. Anderson adaptation from the 90s, the only one of these movies close to good. Sure, that one was cheaply made and narratively simplistic, too. But at least its effects and action had energy and atmosphere. (And it put the theme song first, starting things on literally the right note.) This one’s just endless bland repetition.
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