‘The Super Mario Bros. Movie’ is for children, but it’s also not beyond critique

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The Super Mario Bros. Movie, to the surprise of no one, is in the midst of a rollicking box office domination. Having more than quadrupled its production budget, becoming the second-highest-grossing video game film adaptation of all time (behind Warcraft), setting a new record for the biggest worldwide opening for an animated film, as well as the biggest domestic debut for a video game adaptation, it looks like Illumination and Nintendo can check this one off as “mission accomplished” by most observable metrics.

It made money, delivered a delightful ride for children, and, not to be forgotten, topped the 1993 Super Mario Bros. film in just about every area (although, that was probably achieved as soon as the production was greenlit).

Despite all of this, the adaptation has received more poor critical reviews than positive, and rightly so.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie is not a good movie. It’s a perfectly harmless slice of entertainment that’s undeserving of any hate, and does more than enough to appease its younger viewers, but in no way does that mean it gets a pass for its poor plotting, weak characterization, or any number of storytelling fundamentals that were given the bare minimum of effort.

One may point to the fact that it’s a children’s film to dismiss the merits of critiquing it, but not only would that be a woeful disregard of the value of critique (which many people, critics included, are guilty of), it would be a scathing insult to children’s films as a whole.

The ultimate, fundamental goal of critique is to identify the ways in which something could be made better and to have the tools to improve both the work itself and subsequent works in similar veins.

So, it automatically becomes useless and nonsensical to