The Super Mario Galaxy Movie power jumped onto the screen in 2023, defying all expectations. Illumination’s stunning animation and light-touch approach to that most cursed of properties, video game adaptations, overcame the pre-buzz doubts about Mario’s appearance to wall-jump to well over $1.3 billion at the global box office. It was a fun, bright and chock-full of so many cameos and little lore details, anyone familiar with Nintendo’s mascot may have wondered what was left for a sequel. 

Well, the answer was going galactic—a step the game series took about 20 years to make. As a platformer, 2007’s Super Mario Galaxy was a shot in the arm not felt since Mario burst into 3D a decade before. It was a kinetic, gravity-defying and playful entry that broke ground as much as Mario stomped it. The opposite of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, then.

For a film proud not to overtly label itself as a sequel, it’s an unpleasant surprise that The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is such a thinned-out remake of the first film. Worse, the same creative team have returned to regurgitate all the wrong bits from the 2023 entry. If they’d been another Mario Kart rainbow race, or macho smackdown with old rival Donkey Kong, things might have sped up. Instead, it’s a patchwork slog of the familiar quest to find a lost sibling—this time Princess Peach’s long-lost sister.

Rosalina (Brie Larson), the adoptive mother of the star-like and super-adorable lumas, is kidnapped by Bowser Junior (Benny Safdie), desperate to free his father (Jack Black) from being a shrunken prisoner of Mario, Luigi and Peach (Chris Pratt, Charlie Day and Anya Taylor-Joy). When a luma escapes to warn Peach, the princess and Toad (Keegan-Michael Key) set out across the galaxy to find the sister she’s slowly remembering, with the help of a cocky Fox McCloud (star of Star Fox, drawled by Glen Powell ). Meanwhile, a devastating assault on Peach’s castle draws Mario, Luigi and newfound egg-laying dinosaur friend Yoshi (Donald Glover) on their own quest off-planet and a rematch with the Koopas. 

The sibling switch at the heart of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie causes two problems. First, it’s a replay of Luigi’s capture in the first film, and that’s a lot more obvious in a 98-minute film than in a platformer. Second, that means it leaves Mario and Luigi together, and let’s be kind, the much-derided 1993 Super Mario Bros. film had more sibling repartee than this. 

With both brothers well beyond the learning curve, they flatly and unjokily bundle through set-pieces with most of the chat around (the increasingly weird) unrequited love Mario has for Peach. There isn’t even a trip back to New York—something that served up some great scenes in the first film—bar one early fun jaunt with Yoshi. Almost all character development is either squashed or a thin joke built in the first instalment (see the neurotic Toads). Glen Powell may be the only one to fly out of this a little enhanced, and that’s mainly because of the patchy year he’s had at the box office. 

Drawing on Galaxy suggested an imaginative planetoid for this film to seize on, and plenty of chances for Mario to learn new things rather than randomly grabbing power-up boxes. But no, aside from an impressive platforming section that cuts between film and games near the end, it’s just a grind of arrive, jump over a host of in-jokes, then move to the next scene. There’s no doubt Illumination has done its homework, packing it out with cameos, in-jokes and ladles of fan-pleasing references. The thing is, these can only have niche appeal for devout Nintendo gamers, and it’s incredible that there’s so much effort in that area, but barely a single good line for the parents. Overall, it’s all very cute, all a bit dull, and skewering unnecessarily young. Despite its wee Pikmin cameo, it’s really in need of some minions to do some of the legwork so the main players can entertain the quadrants.

Star Fox’s presence may suggest a Super Mario Smash film somewhere on a flagpole in the franchise’s future, but while Galaxy should have been an explosion, it’s hard to see it as anything else but a setback.