The Super Mario Bros Movie is coming out in April, and fans are still debating whether the movie will be good or yet another bad video game adaptation. The jury is still out despite having two trailers to look at. But a new clip of the movie does highlight some things of note. Ironically, this weekend, the new clip came out during the NFL championship games. This is a bit odd as Mario hasn’t been in an American Football game in the past, but we digress. On Twitter, the clip got a lot of attention for various reasons. Some good and some bad.
Let’s start with the positive. In the clip, we get a new look at the match between Mario and Donkey Kong. Based on previous trailers, it’s speculated that the two are fighting to help “train Mario” for the fight against Bowser. But the fight isn’t going well for Mario, so he uses a power-up in the form of the Cat Bell, becoming Cat Mario. The response he gets is not what you’d expect, nor what Mario expected.
Through that laughing reaction, we hear the voice of Seth Rogan as Donkey Kong. But, unfortunately, as you can hear, the voice is very much Seth Rogen’s real-life voice, and therein lies the problem. Because when you add that to the new clips of Mario talking and sounding exactly like Chris Pratt’s real voice, you see that this is now two actors who aren’t putting a lot of “nuance” into their roles and instead acting like themselves.
It’s true that we’ve only heard a few lines with Donkey Kong, so he could sound better than we think. But once again, the first impressions could be better. Instead, they’re rather mixed. Some on Twitter and beyond seemed ok with everything shown, but others weren’t sold.
Many questions still need to be answered about this movie before and after its release. We know that Nintendo and Illumination are going all out for the film in terms of promotion, so at the very least, that’s positive. Massive toy lines are being made to help promote the film, and as noted, they had a TV spot during two big NFL games.
But the question of quality matters the most here because we’ve had a string of good video game adaptations between Sonic The Hedgehog and The Last of Us. Many hope the Super Mario Bros Movie adds its name to the list.
