Listen, I don't like Chris Pratt. I do think he's funny and entertaining, but he also has terrible values and should be avoided for the most part. That said, I also like Super Mario Bros, and I had to weigh them out, and at this point in history, I'm picking my battles. I'm running out of hope, which also means that I'm running out of fucks to give about things like whether or not I like Chris Pratt. I'm just gonna watch movies and let that shit sort itself out. I'm clocking out.
I liked the first one well enough. It was corny and suffered from some of the modern tendencies in animation that I sometimes find off-putting, This kind of Minion-ification of cartoons. Luckily, this one toned down some of those annoying habits and put its focus on telling the story, such as it was. That story was, weirdly, very much like Star Wars. Star Wars meaning the first movie. Meaning the first movie they made, which was the fourth movie in the series. Episode 4 that is. There was a displaced royal figure sent to hide away from forces that sought to exploit their power, there was a Han Solo figure, complete with a seedy bar, a huge planet destroying doomsday device, and a ton of just little one off references. A surprising amount of Star Wars. I'd say it's just the Hero's Journey at play, but these were fairly specific.
Something kind of funny happened at the movies though. I was in line, and the guy in this line next to me is with his little kid, and he's asking the woman at the counter if she had anymore "Kirby buckets" and the woman was very confused and eventually asked "Do you mean this one?" and held up the Yoshi bucket and I finally looked at him and shook my head and said "Kirby? KIRBY? That is Yoshi my guy." and he just looked ashamed and then as I got my popcorn and was leaving, I looked at him again and shook my head.
He thought it was funny anyway. Or I assume he did.
Anyway, back to the movie.
So the music was really well done and nicely used. I found the first movie suffered from WAY too much Holding-Out-For-A-Hero-itis. Way too many popular songs inserted for cool points. This one had almost none of that, and was better for it.
It did have a lot of characters posing for some reason. I'm guessing that was a reference to the fact that Mario sometimes does that in the games, but it got old pretty quick.
Yoshi was fine for being a kind of generic cute animal that says its own name ala-Groot. I don't have a whole lot of nostalgia or affection for the characters of that world, but I do love that those characters and lore are all there to be mined. I don't know the Super Mario Bros world beyond beyond the Mario 64 game and various Mark Karts, but I do like the vibe of it. I could tell there were a lot of references and easter eggs that I was missing, but that was fine. I don't feel like not knowing that stuff impacted my enjoyment any.
Luckily, Jack Black was on a shorter leash this time, and the various fligga-gee-goos and such were at a minimum. This movie also had the benefit of not being an origin story that had to establish the world and the characters, so it could just jump right into the story. That was helpful.
I think the last cartoon I watched in the theater was the first Mario Bros movie, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. It's not my genre or really my fandom, but I did enjoy this movie for what it was, which was a silly kids movie that I probably would have thought was pretty great when I was 12.