I don’t think anyone could have predicted what an unbelievable success The Super Mario Bros. Movie was going to be. We knew it was going to be big, but we didn’t know it was going to be biggest five-day-opening-of-all-time big. Super Mario is on pace to easily top Warcraft as the highest-grossing video game movie ever, and if it keeps this momentum it might even challenge the likes of Frozen and the soulless, photorealistic remake of The Lion King for highest-grossing animated movie too.

Super Mario is a huge success, and it’s no surprise that audiences are loving it. It's a quickly-paced crowd-pleaser with tons of nostalgic references, some thrilling action moments, and Jack Black sings a silly song. I hate to admit it, but Chris Pratt does a decent job as the humble plumber. Don’t tell anyone I said that.

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Audiences can’t say enough nice things about it, but there’s one oft-repeated bit of praise I take issue with. Looking through Rotten Tomatoes audience reviews, the social media reactions, and even comments from my colleagues, the most commonly repeated sentiment I hear is that The Super Mario Bros. Movie works because it feels like a video game. Putting my feelings aside about how well the movie works - the box office return clearly proves that it does - I take some issue with this point of view. No, I don’t think Super Mario “feels like a video game”, but you know what movie does? John Wick: Chapter 4.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie is certainly full of things from the video game, that much is true. Mario, Bowser, and Princess Peach are all there, along with the goombas and koopas and every other nasty little guy under the thrall of King Koopa. The adventure takes our heroes to the Mushroom Kingdom and the Jungle Kingdom - which is more like a Mario Kart world than the Kong Island from the games, but I’ll let this one slide. They use power-ups, they jump in green pipes to get around, and they drive down Rainbow Road. All of the iconographies from Mario games is there, but does that make it “feel” like a video game, or is it just a movie that feels authentically Mario?

There’s nothing about the narrative structure, scene construction, or shot selection that makes Super Mario any different from every other computer-animated movie from the last decade. It doesn’t play out in a 2D side scroller or third-person perspective. The scenes are set up like levels that Mario has to beat before he can move on to the next. Other than the power-ups, there’s no plot devices that frame anything that happens in a video game. If you had no prior knowledge of the Mario games, I don’t think you’d make the same claim. The aspects of it that relate to video games - a hero on a quest, a villain to defeat, special skills to master - relate to Kung Fu Panda just as well, and no one ever compared it to a video game.

The scene that comes closest to representing what it's like to play Mario is the training montage where Peach teaches Mario how to use power-ups, but even that leans into film conventions far more than video game conventions. It’s a montage that distorts time, not a single level played over and over until it's mastered. This is the domain of Rocky, not Nintendo. Also, Mario does so many things in this sequence that he never does in the games. When he gets to a pillar of empty blocks, he charges and punches through them. He skips along the top of Bullet Bills. He power slides around a corner. At one point he goes into slow motion while mugging at Peach because he thinks he’s won, only to get chomped on the head by a robot Piranha Plant. He does all of this to the tune of Bonnie Tyler’s I Need A Hero. I'm sorry, this is not Mario stuff. This is not video game stuff. It’s movie stuff.

Which brings me to John Wick: Chapter 4, which is a hell of a video game movie. Unlike the Mario movie, John Wick’s story is structured like a series of video game levels. After a set-piece intro in the desert that teaches Wick how to move and shoot (every game needs a tutorial, even a fourquel), the game starts at the Osaka Continental. Chapter 4 mixes third-person shooter gameplay with tight, melee combat, and lets him seamlessly switch between combat styles. Every combat encounter is shown in long, unbroken shots from a fixed camera position, either over Wick’s shoulder or positioning him on a flat plane with his opponents like a fighting game.

There’s a lot of enemy variety in each mission. The Osaka Continental throws countless assassins with swords at him, followed by a cover-shooter segment, and finally pits him against High Table representatives wearing bulletproof suits. He has to adjust his playstyle to each type of enemy and arena he fights in. Later missions introduce larger enemies that absorb melee hits, enemies wearing bullet-proof masks, and a handful of mini-bosses, including one that fights with a dog.

It has a lot of gameplay variety between missions too. There’s an entire battle that takes place in the middle of the Arc de Triomphe roundabout in Paris that starts out as a driving mission and turns into an extended combat encounter where Wick has to dodge cars while he fights. The piece de resistance of John Wick: Chapter 4, the level everyone will be talking about for years to come, is a top-down shooter mission pulled straight out of Hotline Miami. Wick wields a shotgun filled with incendiary rounds - an ammo type that was surely invented for video games, while he systematically eliminates every enemy in an apartment, using walls and corners as cover as he blasts his targets with Dragon’s Breath, turning them into ragdolls that sail across the room. The entire sequence is one, unbroken shot from a bird’s-eye view. It’s the most direct video game sequence since Doom’s first-person shooter scene.

You can practically feel Wick pressing square to reload as he advances through each battle, moving from cover to cover and lining up his target reticle on faceless thugs. Wick eliminates several hundred people throughout the film, but it’s easy to tell when certain stunt performers are repeated. After all, there’s only so many character models available in any game. John Wick and Super Mario represent two very different kinds of video games, obviously, but John Wick’s the only one that successfully approximates what it’s like to play a game. I don’t begrudge the Mario Movie fans, but if they really think it feels like a video game - and aren’t just saying it because it feels like a thing you should say - they should watch John Wick: Chapter 4 and get back to me.

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