Today’s quick review: Super Mario Bros. Mario Mario (Bob Hoskins) and Luigi Mario (John Leguizamo) are a pair of New York plumbers who get more than they bargained for when they run into Daisy (Samantha Mathis), an archeologist working on an excavation in the heart of New York. When corporate goons sabotage the dig site, the brothers are called in for some emergency plumbing. But while they are busy, the goons kidnap Daisy and drag her through a rock wall into another dimension. The brothers follow right behind and dive into an alternate universe where humans evolved from dinosaurs instead of mammals. They find themselves in Dinohattan, a hectic and dystopian version of New York. There they uncover a plot by King Koopa (Dennis Hopper) to use his de-evolution ray to invade New York and solve Dinohattan’s water shortage by force.
People often speculate about how video games would look on the silver screen. Certain concepts could be transferred directly, but others would have to be adapted heavily or dropped to work in a live-action movie. Super Mario Bros. is what happens when these discussions take place in Hollywood board rooms instead of on Internet discussion forums. The Mario Bros. franchise is an unusually difficult series for adaptation. Born in the early days of gaming and adapted only ten years into their thirty-year history, Mario games have minimalistic storylines, a fantastical setting designed around gameplay elements, and iconic concepts, such as stomping on enemies or bumping into item blocks, that have no real-world analogues.
Super Mario Bros. handles these issues by constructing a new setting and plot around a few core concepts, then dropping other familiar elements from the game into them. The brothers’ Italian heritage is explained by having them hail from real-world New York rather than the Mushroom Kingdom. Toad becomes a free spirit with a harmonica who is turned into a tiny-headed “goomba” by Koopa’s de-evolution ray. Birdo becomes a heavyset woman at a nightclub who dances with Mario and later helps the brothers out. Jumping appears in the form of jet boots powered by Bullet Bill-shaped cartridges. The list goes on. A surprising amount of care is taken to ensure that most of the iconic parts of the games appear in one form or another, however fleeting or distorted.
Quality-wise, Super Mario Bros. is a terrible movie and a fantastic watch. As a video game adaptation, Super Mario Bros. badly twists the source material. Dinohattan and its surrounding plot are cut from whole cloth and have little to do with the games. The words “Mario” and “urban dystopia” are a terrible fit for each other, and while the Easter egg hunt for game elements can be entertaining, the adaptations themselves are bizarre mirrors of the originals.
As a standalone movie, Super Mario Bros. is a chaotic mess with a far-fetched premise even by the standards of 90s kids movies. The camp setting and colorful characters are reminiscent of The Fifth Element, but where The Fifth Element offers a complicated adventure tied together by skilled direction and memorable performances, Super Mario Bros. struggles to bring its elements into a coherent whole.
But as an experience, Super Mario Bros. hangs with the best. The combination of cheesy sci-fi elements, lame jokes, and off-the-wall pacing are enough to keep you entertained throughout the movie, and whether you are laughing at the movie or with it is of secondary concern. To its credit, Super Mario Bros. does not take itself too seriously, and as a cheesy romp taken on its own terms, this makes it quite enjoyable. While it lacks the redeeming qualities that make other campy movies worth watching, it also lacks the banality of other kids movies of the era. Its misguided creativity leads it to a number of cringeworthy decisions, but they are creative, interesting decisions nonetheless and can be enjoyed as such.
Super Mario Bros. is worth watching if you are looking for a spectacular bastardization of a familiar video game series. It is also worth watching if you are looking for an innocent kids film with unusual creative daring. To what degree Super Mario Bros. will fill either of these roles for you depends on your personal tastes, but both require a willingness to be entertained, to suspend disbelief and not take the movie too seriously. With the right attitude, Super Mario Bros. can be quite an enjoyable watch. 4.0 out of 10 on IMDB.