Oh boy, I have been waiting for this. I'd heard so many terrible things about Super Mario Bros. before I started it, I just couldn't wait to see how awful it is.
Super Mario Bros. is a movie that is best described as "so bad it's actually enjoyable to watch." The movie is such a fever dream of nonsense I felt like I should've taken mushrooms before I started (see what I did there?).
Let's talk about the premise, because it's so stupid that I didn't believe it was real even as the movie was narrating it to me through Bob Hoskin's fake Brooklyn accent. The meteor that struck the earth and killed the dinosaurs didn't actually kill the dinosaurs, it created a parallel dimension where dinosaurs continued to evolve a become more intelligent life that look just like humans.
That's just how it starts. Apparently the ruler of the dinosaur dimension, King Koopa (Dennis Hopper, yes really) wants to fuse the two dimensions so that he can rule our dimension as well (this is starting to sound more like Mortal Kombat than a Mario story), but is thwarted when Princess Daisy (Samantha Mathis) is sent into our dimension as a baby(hatchling, she literally is a human who hatches from an egg but apparently evolved from mushrooms) with a piece of the meteorite, which apparently is what fuses the two dimensions.
Heck, that's still just set up, and they manage to deliver most of that information within five minutes. We haven't even gotten to the Mario brothers yet. They're a pair of poor plumbers, Mario played by Bob Hoskins, and Luigi played by a young John Leguizamo. They meet Daisy as an adult, and Luigi falls for her immediately. After a double date between, Luigi, Daisy, Mario, and Mario's girlfriend Daniella (Dana Kaminski), Daisy is kidnapped by two of Koopa's minions, Iggy and Spike (Fisher Stevens and Richard Edson), and dragged back into the dinosaur dimension, but not before Luigi gets a hold of the meteorite piece. Soon after, Mario and Luigi go after Daisy into the dinosaur dimension.
I could seriously go on for hours about this movie's plot, because it just fails to make sense at every possible turn. They never explain how the dinosaur dimension is aware of ours when we have no idea that theirs exists. For some reason, Daisy is the only one who can merge the dimensions, but that's never explained either. Then there's the de-evolution machine, which makes about as much sense as Pokemon evolution; it just turns people into goombas because they apparently evolved from goombas. Why a movie that originated from a game about a plumber jumping on platforms and eating mushrooms needs a de-evolution machine, I don't know, you just have to go with it. Well, you just have to go with a lot of it.
I really should stop focusing on the plot, because there's so many more terrible aspects of the film that I can talk about. The acting and dialogue are both horrible, and the awfulness of each makes the other that much more noticeable. Lines like "Oh, I was abandoned" just come off as unintentionally hilarious when they're delivered in a completely and totally casual manner. It all just feels so forced and unnatural.
There's next to nothing to suggest that this was based on the beloved video game series. The only identifiable similarities are the names, and every character does have to be named so that you know who they are, because there is seriously no visible relation. We have to be told that Toad is Toad, or Yoshi is Yoshi.
I really don't want this to become much longer than it already is, so I will say that the movie isn't without a little appeal. The film is interesting to look at, with a cool dystopian set design, so there is some legitimate visual enjoyment. The rest of the entertainment, however, comes from picking at every little moment of the film that makes the whole experience that much more awful.
The Verdict: I can't believe that Super Mario Bros. exists. It's a legitimately baffling experience of a film that manages to fail on a storytelling level at every turn. I cannot in good conscious recommend this to anybody unless they're willing to sacrifice an hour and a half of their life just to laugh at a bad movie (though I always am, so I won't blame anybody if they are).
Rating: 2/10
Watched January 13th, 2016, Published July 8th, 2016
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