I’m late to this, but if you have kids under ten, I highly recommend taking them to see The Super Mario Bros. Movie. Some conservative commentators have pointed out that it lacks anything like “woke” messaging. I would put it another way: It’s just aimed at pleasing children without condescending to them.

It’s funny, too, because, as comedians have pointed out, the Super Mario Bros. video game was itself a kind of affectionately racist caricature of Italian Americans in Queens by Japanese developers.

The enjoyment for a middle-aged viewer who played the Mario games as a child is in the extremely clever way the filmmakers have adapted the visual and musical cues of the video games into the visual language of the movie. Or the way that a hackneyed “training” montage builds upon the experience of learning to play a Mario Bros. video game.

The movie is going to make a bazillion dollars once it’s released worldwide. And I imagine there will be several sequels. My boys were bouncing up and down in their seats throughout the climactic battle. I had a blast just watching them.