The Super Mario Bros. Movie is a pitch straight through the center of the record. It is uncomplicated, light-hearted and risk-free. It’s exactly the kind of Mario origin story you’d expect after the disastrous critical reception of the 1993 live-action movie. SuperMario Brothers. – and for all those reasons, it’s pretty boring.
It has none of the grandeur of 1993 Super Mario Bros., a film that enraged its stars and cinema audiences with its bizarre creative decisions. Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo, who played Mario and Luigi in the movie, respectively, drank whiskey between takes to deal with the production’s chaotic set, which may have led to Hoskins’ repeated injuries during filming. In 2007, Hoskins recounted The protector That Super Mario Bros. was ‘the worst thing I’ve ever done… It was a goddamn nightmare. The whole experience was a nightmare. It had a husband-and-wife team directing, whose arrogance had been mistaken for talent. After so many weeks their own agent told them to get off the set! Damn nightmare. Damned idiots.”
Of course it’s best that the Super Mario Bros. set environment was not replicated in the making of the 2023 animated film. (At least as far as we know.) But the over-correction in the other direction led to a movie that lacks any sense of spontaneity, creativity, or narrative risk. The Super Mario Bros. movie is so by-the-books that you could easily predict the entire plot from the trailers alone. At least the plot you’d predict would probably have more twists and turns than the actual movie.
But Maddyyou might think, not The Super Mario Bros. movie for children? It doesn’t have to be complicated. Sure, I understand your point. One of the big criticisms of the 1993 Mario movie is that it’s not very kid-friendly unless you’re a kid who enjoys gross, dark sci-fi. In Super Mario Bros., the Mushroom Kingdom is reimagined as Dinohattan, a cyberpunk dystopia in an alternate universe populated by dinosaur-human hybrids ruled by the vicious tyrant King Koopa (Dennis Hopper). In addition to kidnapping human females from our universe’s version of Manhattan in search of the long-lost Princess Daisy, King Koopa also has a terrifying “de-evolution” device that can transform any living creature into a primal version of itself.
Since it’s live action and relies heavily on practical effects, the sets are from Super Mario Bros. look just as disgusting and unfriendly as Total recall‘s image of colonized Mars. They have been smoothed with slime and rust, all to illustrate the societal damage King Koopa’s reign has wrought.
Super Mario Bros. is much darker in tone and appearance than The Super Mario Bros. movie of 2023 – but it’s also a fascinating take on the games’ silly premise. The games never explain why Mario, an Italian-American human from New York City, ends up in a world populated by anthropomorphic fungi. But if that actually happened to him, wouldn’t it be scary and bizarre instead of light-hearted and fun? When Hoskins and Leguizamo’s Mario and Luigi find themselves in this dinosaur-populated, mold-filled alt-universe, it really feels like the two plumbers from Brooklyn are in for a serious challenge. But as hardscrabble independent entrepreneurs, they’ve cleaned up a lot of literal messes and dealt with some very difficult clients, so it’s an odd sort of feeling that their response is to roll up their sleeves and dig into Dinohattan’s problems.
Image: Nintendo, lighting/Universal Pictures
The Super Mario Bros. movie basically has the same premise as the live-action movie, but with all the unusual and gritty edges sanded out. Mario and Luigi are still plumbers from Brooklyn who fall into a portal to another world. But instead of the wacky magical explanations and world-building of the 1993 film, The Super Mario Bros. movie put all those questions aside and throw Mario into a series of platform puzzles. Question blocks randomly exist everywhere and deliver powerups for no apparent reason. Princess Peach is a human female who leads the Toadstool population; she doesn’t seem to care about her own mysterious origin story. Bowser wants to kidnap Peach and marry her, because she is beautiful and cool; no further characterization or plot points required.
And the big lesson at the end of the movie? Something broad and general about the value of determination, the characters keep repeating, until Mario and Luigi grab the perfect power-up to beat Bowser. So this is not really a lesson. It’s more like watching someone play a Mario game.
The fact that the live action Super Mario Bros. trying to come up with explanations for Mario’s bizarre world makes it that much more hilarious and special to watch even now. The grimy world of the 1993 movie is bursting with character, and are many Easter eggs and references feel deserved because of it, not least because several of them are subtle and easily overlooked. At one point, Mario and Luigi go to a nightclub called the Boom Boom Bar, named after the Super Mario Bros. 3 boss. Neon signs adorn the streets of Dinohattan, with references to several other enemies, such as Boo Diddly and Bullet Bill. Characters such as Big Bertha, Iggy and Spike also appear in the film, adapted into live-action humanoid versions, each with a job or motivation that takes a twist on their original sources of inspiration.
In the Illumination animated movie, the references are just one-to-one recreations of the things from the games, with no iteration or reimagining. No attempt has been made to explain or characterize these elements beyond their established and accepted existence. That’s not to say that the movie would be somehow better if a character explained why eating mushrooms causes Mario to grow or shrink. But compared to the bizarre mold overgrowth in Dinohattan that gives Mario and Luigi mysterious power-ups, The Super Mario Bros. movie feels pretty dialed in.
Image: Hollywood Photos
That makes business sense The Super Mario Bros. movie has so little to add to the source material. After all, it’s not scary or alienating, which means it’s likely to make a trillion dollars. It remains a missed opportunity. Like the live-action versions of Disney movies, or the moments when the HBO version of The last of us created the game’s cutscenes shot-by-shot, The Super Mario Bros. movie feels like a sad new entry in a very boring trend.
The last of us adaptation soared as it embraced new possibilities, such as rewriting the relationship between Bill and Frank. Seeing an adaptation almost completely identical to what came before – or, worse, even more boring and flatter than what came before – begs the question of why any studio would bother to adapt anything. Without saying something new, a new aesthetic or vision to add to the table, there’s no point… other than raking in easy cash without going through the burden of actually reimagining a popular franchise for a new setting.
If you don’t care to see a weirder and more creative vision of Mario – like Super Mario Bros. tried in 1993 – then just buy a copy of Super Mario Odyssey and play that instead. It offers as much entertainment as The Super Mario Bros. movie, and then some, because Mario can wear a wedding dress in that game. It’s adorable, and it’s more subversive than anything that happens in either Mario movie adaptation.