Super Mario Bros. The Movie

Yoshi! ...cute, eh?

I'm gonna guess that you're cringing right now. The title "Super Mario Bros." alone is enough to set the ball rolling.

Super Mario Bros. was a critical failure and box-office bomb. Hardly surprising. To sum up this nightmarish mess of a film: its the concept of the universally popular Super Mario Bros. series... but daaarker and more edgy. Why anyone thought this is a good idea I'll never know, either way, this concept works out as well as you think it would: not even slightly.

There are two main criticisms I have for this film.
Firstly, Super Mario Bros. gives off the impression that it doesn't know what it is. Is it a darker re-imagining of the video game series? Or is it a comical live action take? Both these suggestions seem to fit the bill, but it really doesn't work. There's a constant mood whiplash going on, one minute the Mario Brothers are being goofy and comical, the next, the villain is trying to push Luigi's eyeballs into his skull. Just... woah. What just happened? What genre does this film fit into? What audience are you targeting, film? It certainly wouldn't appeal to either a general audience or to the video gamer fans. Trying to give a video game series known for its colourful, bright and childish appeal and turn it into a dark, edgy film with a modern live action twist actually could have worked... but this flitted between the comical and the dark so often it left me confused. A perfect example of the dark, modern take actually working is Christopher Nolan's recent Batman trilogy. Batman had been known for its film and tv adaptations to be incredibly silly and light-hearted, but with Nolan's re-imagining of the concept, he successfully made his trilogy dark and edgy... but only that. He didn't thrown in a lot of goofy jokes and slapstick humour, it wouldn't have fit in.

Goomba

Secondly, this film's ideologies are terrifying. Super Mario Bros. video gamer audiences would have been relatively young around the time this was released, and the creators should have bared that in mind. The possibly unintentional nightmare-fuel is produced mainly from the film's design. The original video game design is colourful and charming, the film's is a horrific and sometimes disgusting re-imagining of the game's concepts. Examples are the "realistic" take on the recurring enemy the "Goomba", the mushrooms that is a form of power-up in the game series and the popular recurring character Yoshi- who looks real yet unsettling. These designs are disastrous, but even more than that- they've missed the point! An endless amount of references were made to the video games, but lack the original charm that made them so iconic to begin with.
Prevalent themes are too mature, you deal with dictatorship, dystopian alternate dimensions, kidnap, intended rape, uncomfortable sexual themes, murder, mutation, sleazy strip clubs...
One scene sticks out for me in this instance. The mobster secondary villain gets turned into a chimp (its not even worth explaining how that comes about...) and the crowd's response? To cheer. The protagonists don't even dish this punishment out, its the primary antagonist dictator King Koopa (Dennis Hopper) who transforms him. The mob leader isn't even explored as a character, let alone one of the villains. His resolution is off-putting and didn't put the supposed "good guys" into a favourable light. And really? Honestly, imagine being turned into a chimp. That's a fate worse than death! But, hey, its the mob leader... he deserved it, right?
And now ladies and gentlemen, I present to you a quote from our beloved plumber hero Mario:

"I'm gonna break every bone in their body... and THEN I'm gonna kill 'em!"


A huge, tremendous, collosal plot hole now. What is with the alternate dimension? Really, what was the point in that? It was such a ridiculous and outlandish idea, and they've not even concerned themselves to fully explaining what the dimension is. Are the inhabitants supposed to be dinosaurs? If they are... why are they appearing as humans? Did Daisy hatch from the egg we see at the beginning? If she's actually a dinosaur, why don't we ever see that form? And why is it "Daisy" in the first place? Its Princess Peach! Daisy is the brunette one, Peach is blonde like the "Dinosaur Daisy" from the film... its clear that you haven't even bothered to do the research, let alone piece together your own plot fully.

Although, despite everything the film does wrong (and trust me, I haven't listed everything and I won't) there are genuine moments of fun to be had. Bob Hoskins, although he publicly expressed that this role is the worst thing he's ever done, he's plays quite a fun Mario and there are moments where I laughed and enjoyed the silliness.
Super Mario Bros. had the problem of trying to please everyone. There were moments for the fans, and moments for the general audience, but unfortunately they didn't mesh together very well at all. It was confusing and quite uncomfortable at times with the mature themes involved, the target audience was vague and it was void of all the charm the original game series had created. Really, I think it just missed the point.