Super Mario Bros. (1993)
directed by Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel
★★½☆☆
At the time of its release, Super Mario Bros. was harshly panned by critics and fans of the games, and practically disavowed by both the studio and Nintendo, who officially licensed and helped promote it. If you want a story of its production and all the problems that plagued it, there are countless articles and YouTube videos documenting it, so I won’t be getting into it here (I highly recommend Super Mario Bros. The Movie Archive, and Norman Caruso’s documentary on The Gaming Historian channel), suffice to say it involved endless amounts of executive meddling, tonal shifts, on-set re-writes, amateur directors, and drunk actors. Everyone who was in it hated it. The directors who made it saw an abrupt end to their brief career. The film lost a lot of money, and was the genesis of nearly three decades of game-to-film adaptations that have ranged in quality from atrocious to mediocre to not altogether awful.
But how bad is Super Mario Bros., really?
The film opens with an animated introduction to the backstory. Basically, when the meteor struck Earth 65 million years ago, it didn’t destroy the dinosaurs, it banished them to an alternate dimension where they evolved into humanoid forms side-by-side with mammals. They have a society and technology, utilities and vehicles, and everything else we had in our modern urban culture circa 1993. Meanwhile, on the human side in 1973, a young woman drops a basket at a convent in New York City, in which the nuns find an egg, whence a baby girl hatches, and a mysterious rock on a string.
20 years later, Mario and Luigi are struggling plumbers in Brooklyn, NY. Nearby, a young paleontology student named Daisy, who wears a very familiar rock around her neck, has a run-in with the unscrupulous Scapelli family, the Mario Brothers’ competition, who sabotage her dig site by trying to flood it. While the Mario Brothers fix the leak, Daisy is kidnapped, and Mario and Luigi attempt to rescue her. They find a portal to another realm in a rock wall below the sewer, and follow her through to the city of Dinohattan, run by the evil President Koopa.
Divorcing the product from its source material reveals its brilliant pedigree. The sets were designed by legendary artist David L. Snyder, best known for Blade Runner, from which he clearly drew more than a little inspiration. The highly-detailed and futuristic-yet-low-tech set dressings of Dinohattan create a perfect dystopian mise-en-scène. The animatronic puppetry of Yoshi and the Goombas are as convincing as any Jim Henson production. CGI, still in its infancy (this film was released almost side-by-side with Jurassic Park), is thankfully used sparingly, and mostly to enhance the pre-existing practical effects.
Where it fails miserably is in its treatment of the source material. The plot almost seems as though it was written for a completely different movie with the names of the Super Mario characters hastily pasted into the final draft of the script, and the next 80 minutes or so does little to disprove this hypothesis. Luigi is Mario’s adopted son/younger brother instead of his twin and blood relative. The damsel in need of rescue is Daisy, not Peach (or Toadstool, as she was known in English at the time — which, honestly, is probably why they didn’t go with the name). Koopa (not Bowser) is president, not King, and a humanoid reptile. Toad is also (at least briefly) humanoid, as are Iggy, Spike, Big Bertha, and just about every other recognizable namesake. The Goombas are large and reptilian, not small and chestnut-like. The Brothers don’t even wear anything remotely resembling their characteristic red and green uniforms (shown on every poster) until the third act.
But putting pedantry aside, the movie is somehow enjoyable through all its flaws. Maybe it was the result of intoxication, or perhaps it’s just good editing, but Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo seem to genuinely have fun with their characters throughout (according to both, it was the former). Dennis Hopper, who retrospectively abhorred this movie, fully commits to his role as Koopa, striking a near-perfect balance of ham and restraint for a live-action cartoon villain. Now an award-winning actress, the relatively unknown Fiona Shaw gives one of the best performances in the movie as Koopa’s unappreciated right-hand woman, Lena. Fisher Stevens and Richard Edson, who play Koopa’s cousins and henchmen, Iggy and Spike, manage to be amusing as both imbeciles and intellectuals. Samantha Mathis is… there.
It’s an inconsistent mess of a film that tried really hard to do a lot of things the best way possible, while totally phoning in everything else. Production was disorganized, the cast and crew were understandably frustrated, the directors were inexperienced, and the studio had to try to sell a movie that was too mature for kids, too childish for adults, and wasn’t really about the video game it was supposed to be based on. The end result is a spectacular train wreck that manages to annoy, entertain, and confuse its target audience all at once.
Is it a bad movie? Not really. Is it a good movie? Not by a long shot. Is it a must-see for any fan of Nintendo who possesses a sense of irony? Most definitely.
