‘The paucity of funny lines is a real puzzle’ … Yoshi (Donald Glover), Mario (Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day) in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. Photograph: Nintendo and Illumination/APView image in fullscreen‘The paucity of funny lines is a real puzzle’ … Yoshi (Donald Glover), Mario (Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day) in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. Photograph: Nintendo and Illumination/APReviewThe Super Mario Galaxy Movie review – bland screensaver of a movie that’s actually worse than AIAt this point, it’s trite to say that a bad film feels as if it’s been AI generated, but this simplistic sequel is next-level – it’s nothing more than an Easter holiday cash grabHere is an inert and uninteresting animated follow-up to The Super Mario Bros Movie, based on the legacy video game about two wacky Italian-Brooklyn plumbers Mario and Luigi, voiced here by Chris Pratt and Charlie Day; this kind of stereotype is evidently the last in mainstream entertainment to be considered offensive. Now they and mushroom-kingdom ruler Princess Peach (voiced by Anya Taylor-Joy) have to rescue Rosalina (Brie Larson), the adoptive mother of the faintly Minion-y creatures called the Lumas. She has been abducted by Bowser Jr (Benny Safdie), the son of wicked turtle Bowser (Jack Black), who did very much the same sort of thing in the previous film.Of course it’s intended for little kids, but it surely didn’t need to be such a visually dull screensaver of a movie, with even more of the cheesy, Euro-knockoff look of that first film. And, again, the paucity of funny lines is a real puzzle. The last film gave us a concerted attempt to spoof the game’s 2D graphics and its left-to-right gameplay movement, with all the running and jumping, making a comic virtue of how absurd it looks. There’s little or nothing of that now, just a pretty uninspired variation of the first storyline, a generic quest adventure whose incidental plot point of Mario’s supposed crush on Princess Peach generates absolutely no interest at all.It’s now commonplace to compare programmatic stuff like this to AI, but this is almost a second evolutionary step downwards; it looks as if humans, using AI, have tried to copy something that was originally AI generated, creating a bland, simplistic template that can be sold in all global territories where it can be dubbed by local voice talent. It’s certainly a way of gouging cash out of families for the Easter holidays.Explore more on these topicsFilmAnimation in filmGamesSuper MarioScience fiction and fantasy filmsChris PrattAnya Taylor-JoyreviewsShareReuse this content