The Super Mario Bros. Movie review: 'Lazy and for fans only'

Mario the plumber has been one of the most beloved characters in the history of video games ever since he was first seen jumping over barrels and running up girders in Donkey Kong in 1981. But even if you've never played a single video game, there is no reason why a Mario film shouldn't be worth seeing. True, 1993's Super Mario Bros, with Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo, was a notorious flop, but The Lego Movie was tied to a line of plastic construction sets, and that was wonderful. Wreck-It Ralph demonstrated how clever a cartoon set in a video-game milieu could be. And another recent release Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Among Thieves proved that films adapted from games could be plenty of fun, whether or not you're familiar with the games in question. Unfortunately, The Super Mario Bros Movie is not one of those films.

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The disappointing part is that the missable new cartoon is directed by Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic, the makers of the brilliantly zany Teen Titans Go!, but every 10-minute episode of that series had more ideas in it than the whole of their film. Another disappointing aspect is that the early scenes set in Brooklyn are promising. Mario (Chris Pratt, who, as well as starring in Guardians of The Galaxy and Jurassic World, voiced the hero in The Lego Movie) and his nervous younger brother Luigi (Charlie Day) are established as good-hearted, bushy-moustached young guys who are trying to build their own independent plumbing business. There are some sly nods to the games, and some witty explanations for the characters' more questionable qualities: their white gloves are a marketing gimmick, Mario tells his sceptical family, and their exaggerated Italian accents are put on for a TV advertisement. There's an amusingly chaotic set piece in which a tap-fixing job is sabotaged by an embittered dog. And the computer-animation is impressively advanced, the only snag being that the textured surfaces of every object are almost photo-realistic, which makes the simplified, rounded Mario and Luigi look like walking cuddly toys in comparison.