Super Mario Bros.

Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel
Rotten Tomatoes score: 13%

Here's a blast from my past. In 1993, I was a huge Nintendo fan (Wasn't everybody?), so when they announced a live-action movie version of Super Mario Bros., I was thrilled. At the time I loved the movie, but honestly, I think the title alone was enough to satisfy me. Obviously the critics (and most other people, to judge from its lousy box-office performance) thought it was awful, but how does it stand up twenty years later?

It seems to me that, if you want to make a property like Mario into a movie, you have two choices: Either (a) you impress the die-hard fans of the video game by being as faithful as possible to it; or (b) you deviate from the source material to make something that will appeal to a general audience. This movie's approach was, in the words of Archie Bunker, "a little too much of both and not enough of neither."

The video game Super Mario Bros. didn't have much of a story, so to satisfy Mario fans, all they really would have had to include was (1) two mustachioed plumbers named Mario and Luigi, who (2) travel to another world, populated by Mushroom People, where they (3) rescue the Princess from a fire-breathing turtle called Koopa. Beyond that, they could have added anything else they thought it needed, and it still would have been pretty true to the source. Yet, not one of those elements was present in the movie. The Marios traveled to a world populated by people who claim to be descended from dinosaurs (but they just look like people, conveniently for the make-up department), and though they do meet a villain called Koopa, he looks a lot less like a turtle than you would expect, and a lot more like Dennis Hopper. They couldn't even get the mustache part right: Luigi (John Leguizamo) is clean-shaven and looks a good 20 years younger than his brother.

Presumably, these choices were made in the hopes of broader audience appeal. Dinosaurs were box-office gold in 1993, and in the movie's defense, the most recent Mario video game had involved some dinosaur characters (including Yoshi, who is depicted in the film by a very impressive animatronic effect). As for Luigi, I can only assume they wanted a younger actor who could go shirtless during the desert scene, but I still can't quite accept him without the mustache.

So we don't get a faithful movie adaptation of a beloved video game. Instead, what we get is really a movie where a lot of people and things are named after parts of the video game. Take Big Bertha for instance. In Super Mario Bros. 3 on Nintendo, Big Bertha was a giant fish with a smaller fish hiding inside her mouth that would swim out at random and kill Mario. In the movie, she's a large, imposing woman in a studded red dress who dances with Mario at a club. Big Bertha works at the "Boom-Boom Bar" and wears "Thwomp Stompers"--both Boom-Boom and Thwomp were also in Mario 3 (they were monsters that you encountered in the dungeon stages), but the movie simply slaps their names on objects that have nothing to do with what they were in the video game. Likewise, Toad--the original fearless fungus--appears as a street musician who gets turned into a Goomba. (Don't get me started on the Goombas, either.)

Even King Koopa himself has little to nothing in common with his video game namesake, aside from the fact that he's a bad guy. The Nintendo version was a ferocious fire-breathing beast; the movie version is a mysophobic dictator with a bad haircut. They even have the gall to call him "President Koopa" instead of King. (Well, sometimes they call him King; it's pretty haphazard. You get the impression that the script was in the middle of a revision or something.)

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In spite of all this, I still enjoy the movie. Bob Hoskins is a great Mario, second only to the late, great Captain Lou Albano from the TV show. John Leguizamo is good too, but he would have been better with a mustache. Samantha Mathis appears as Daisy, standing in for Princess Toadstool from the video game (I guess they figured "Toadstool" was a weird name for a leading lady).

Fisher Stevens and Richard Edson are predictable but mildly amusing as Koopa's clueless cousins and lackeys. A rather undeveloped story thread features Gianni Russo as a mob boss, who harasses our heroes in the Real World in the first act and gets transformed into an ape by Koopa in the third. Probably the most effective villain performance comes from Fiona Shaw as Lena, a completely made-up character who gets turned turned into a fossil on a cave wall. (Luigi quips: "She sure knows how to make an impression." Wow, Mushroom World has made him cold.)

I think the movie is most enjoyable if you just ignore any connection to the video game and any pretense of making sense out it. The story is so preposterous that it required a last-minute tacked-on prologue with narration asking that age-old question: "What if the dinosaurs weren't all destroyed? What if the impact of that meteorite created a parallel dimension, where the dinosaurs continued to thrive and evolve into intelligent, vicious, aggressive beings, just like us? And, hey! What if they found a way back?" (That's a quote.) But if you don't examine anything too closely, it's entertaining.

And best of all, it gave us this cover of a classic funk hit, performed by George Clinton and the Goombas: Check it out.

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