Film Review: Super Mario Bros. (1993)

Hollywood screen adaptations of popular video games, with few notable exceptions, end like big disappointments. That pattern was established at the very start. Super Mario Bros., 1985 platform game that spawned immensely successful franchise and is often considered one of the most influential and best video games of all times, received the honour of being the very first video game to become feature film. However, despite intense hype and large budget Super Mario Bros., 1993 film directed by Ricky Morton and Annabel Jenkel, turned into huge disappointment and is often considered to be among the worst films ever made.

The plot, very loosely inspired by Super Mario World, game released in 1990, begins with huge meteorite that wiped up most of dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Apparently the shock of the explosion created inter-dimensional rift allowing some dinosaurs to survive in another dimension and gradually involve in intelligent human-like beings. In 1973 Brooklyn mysterious woman leaves huge egg in Catholic orphanage, and nuns sees human-like baby being hatched. The baby grew up to be Daisy (played by Samantha Mathis), New York University student working on paleontological site, which actually contains between two worlds. She meets two protagonists – Italian plumber Mario Mario (played by Bob Hoskins) and his younger brother Luigi (played by John Leguizamo) who falls in love with Daisy. When she gets abducted they decide to set her free and follow abductors through the dimensional portal into Dinohattan, city populated by human-like dinosaurs and ruled by evil King Koopa (played by Dennis Hopper). Daisy is actually a princess, daughter of King Bowser (played by Lance Henriksen) whom Koopa dethroned, and she was in possession of a small rock that could merge two worlds, allowing Koopa to rule over humans. But the rock ends in possession of Mario brothers who would have to use all of their plumbing and other skills to save Daisy and thwart Koopa’s plans.

Super Mario Bros. was one of the more ambitious Hollywood projects of its time. It started as independent production before being taken over by Disney, which would inject almost 50 million US$ of budget, hoping to exploit popularity of the game among the youngest audience just like producers of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had exploited popularity of comic books and toy lines few years earlier. The results were, however, disappointing; film not only received bad reviews but also drastically underperformed at the box office. What was even worse was creation of extremely bad reputation among cinephiles that last to this day, only partially tempered by small but dedicated group of die hard fans that created cult status.

Like in most such cases, most viewers are likely to find both views on Super Mario Bros. too extreme. The film is definitely not among the worst ever made, but it is hardly particularly good. The positive things to say about Super Mario Bros. could be found in very good and colourful cinematography by Dean Semler, some interesting production design and combination of early CGI and animatronics that proved very good special effects for its time (especially in the scenes featuring Yoshi, baby tyrannosaurus and Daisy’s adopted pet). Bob Hoskins seems perfectly cast in the role of Mario and does very good job, despite his later claims that he hated the film and reports that he and Leguizamo extensively drank on the set in order to cope with frustration and dysfunctionality on the set.

Most of the film’s problems can attributed to hiring of Morton and Jankel, husband-and-wife team best known for creation of 1980s cult television series Max Headroom. They apparently viewed lack of detailed character exposition in the original games as an opportunity to create their own, more original film. Super Mario Bros., with a script that took a little bit of inspiration from Wizard from Oz, was supposed to be very dark and adult film. That created constant clashes with Disney, that wanted more family-friendly film and resulted in endless quarrels and script rewrites. This reflected on the dialogues in the film, which are very poor. Dennis Hopper, who would later, just like Hoskins, express dissatisfaction with the film, delivers one-note performance of a standard villain, unworthy of his talent and charisma. Samantha Mathis is, on the other hand, completely wasted in the role of stereotypical damsel in distress. Fisher Stevens and Richard Edson, who play Koopa’s inept henchmen, are a little bit more interesting as source of additional comedy, but even they can’t rescue this film from sinking into mediocrity. Thankfully, only two years later Mortal Kombat proved that video games can be adapted well, but the whole idea had been nevertheless looking very bad in the start.

RATING: 4/10 (+)

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