“The Super Mario Bros. Movie ” – Lets-a-Go

Nintendo’s beloved character Mario is one of the most iconic gaming icons since his first appearance in the 1981 arcade game Donkey Kong; the red hat, white gloves, overalls and mustache are universally recognizable, and the 200+ games that he has been featured in for the last 50 years have undeniably made an impact on our lives in one way or another. So when The Super Mario Bros. Movie was first announced back in 2018, fans were bubbling with excitement — only to be hit with a slight letdown from the first teaser trailer in October 2022. The original voice of Mario, Charles Martinet, had been replaced by Chris Pratt, who revealed an uninspiring Mario voice with a subtle Brooklyn accent, reminiscent of the one by Lou Albano in The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!, an animated series that aired on television in 1989.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom Bites Off More Than It Can Chew

To appropriate Ian Malcolm’s (Jeff Goldblum) famous line from 1993’s Jurassic Park, Universal Studios’ executives were so preoccupied with whether or not they could make a sequel series to Steven Spielberg’s hit dino film that they never stopped to think about whether they should have. Yet in Hollywood, when there are more explanations for why a film bombs at the box office than why it exists in the first place, even a sacred fossil like the Jurassic Park franchise is not allowed a graceful passing. In 2015, the nostalgic yet predictable Jurassic World was released, and roaring into screens three years later is Fallen Kingdom. Thanks to director J.A. Bayona’s chilling oversight (if there was ever to be a horror movie with dinos to be made, this would be the one) and a fresh setting to ground the monstrous conflict (the saga has finally moved on from malfunctioning theme parks and their clueless supervisors), this sequel is a marked improvement over its predecessor. However, like its featured hybrid dinosaur the Indoraptor, Fallen Kingdom’s 128 minute runtime is unevenly split amongst the goals it sets out to achieve, and its attempts at complexity and multi-layering come off as convoluted.

Passengers: A Wasted Chris Pratt Oscar Nomination

There is no reason that Passengers had to be a mediocre film, and it is just that — mediocre. Though I certainly enjoyed parts of the film, there’s no chance I remember this movie next holiday season. That’s a shame because director Morten Tyldum’s film had a 110 million dollar budget and a star-studded cast. Passengers is the tale of Jim Preston, played by Chris Pratt, a traveler on the Starship Avalon, which is voyaging from an overpopulated Earth to a budding colony world. When a collision with a large asteroid causes Jim’s hibernation pod to malfunction, he finds himself alone aboard a ship nearly 90 years from its destination — doomed to never see the Avalon’s destination.