Super Mario Bros.: Retro Review
Ah the 90’s! Does anyone remember this movie? My fondness for it was extreme when I was a small child, but I don’t think I knew anything about property adaptations. I’m sure I knew less than nothing about a property being faithful to its source material. This is from the Super Mario Bros. franchise. The video game series that stars the most recognizable video game character of all time. Mario has been in more video games than any other character that exist. His first appearance in Donkey Kong led to the invention of the now taken for granted D-Pad and his first solo venture is the second highest selling game of all times.
Even though he began as Jump Man the carpenter, he is much more widely known as Mario the Plumber with the tall brother named Luigi. They have the bulk of their adventures in the Mushroom Kingdom, which is ruled by Mario’s love interest, Princess Peach (Toadstool) and constantly terrorized by Bowser (King Koopa), the king of the koopas. The usual plots involve Bowser kidnapping Peach for some reason or another and Mario and Luigi saving her.
Of course they have other adventures, like the Super Mario Land games where they travel to Sarasaland and save Princess Daisy from an alien invader named Tatanga. We won’t even get into the other enemies like Wario and Waluigi. They’ve gone through a lot, but this storyline about dinosaurs being in another dimension and evolving in a parallel way to humans is kind of out of nowhere. Explained to us by a narrator with an EXTREME guido accent, the plot is insanely convoluted.
The meteorite that we historically credit with the extinction of dinosaurs actually split the world into two dimensions because of a really small fragment that can only be replaced by a member of the royal family. This is where Princess Daisy comes in. She is one of these dinosaur people, but her mother escaped her world and left her egg with a bunch of nuns who for some reason didn’t immediately destroy the clearly demonic baby that was inside of it. I’ve met nuns and I don’t think I met one that would not destroy a baby that came out of an egg or at least tell a priest to do it. Hell, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who wouldn’t immediately destroy a baby that came out of a giant egg. At the very least they would sell it to some kind of lab.
In the games, there is a hinted at romance between Daisy and Luigi, but this is definitely one of the larger focuses of this movie. Pretty much everything Luigi does is driven by his desire to be with this woman he met the same day she was kidnapped. Oh and also Mario raised Luigi. They used it as a connecting point between the two love birds, but it didn’t really serve a purpose other than that. They could used anything else and just let Mario and Luigi just remain brothers. After all, they decided to keep that part with the last name in the movie.
There are all kinds of half-a**ed references to the game franchise here. They have jumping boots that are loaded with cartridges that look like Bullet Bills, mushrooms that grow (they don’t make the characters get bigger, they just grow), little Bob-Ombs that for some reason people treat like nuclear weapons even though they don’t kill the person they’re right under. They go as far as to have a scene where they travel through a pipe and the plumber aspect is definitely done to death here. Yoshi makes an appearance as an terrifying dinosaur pet that tries to eat someone’s leg and Toad is a street musician that gets turned into a goomba. There are more terrible references, but I’m exhausted at this point.
Did I mention that goombas are soldiers that are devolved from people who disappoint Dennis Hopper… Er um.. President/King Koopa? Yeah, they’re giant, dumb dinosaur people and not angry mushrooms. Pretty much the same way that Toad isn’t a happy mushroom. Then there are Koopas cousins, Iggy and Spike; Big Bertha, the large female bouncer with a thing for Mario; the fungus king with no name; Lena the jealous idiot who dies in horrific fashion; Mob boss/construction jerk, Anthony Scapelli and Koopa’s hair. Pretty much everyone in this movie is a villain, at least in my eyes.
The weird thing is the lack of Peach, or even Pauline. Mario is in a relationship with a random woman named Danielle. Just someone he’s with as the whole Italian family east spaghetti at an Italian restaurant. What was that about? They didn’t have any mushroom people, super star powers ups, special suits or fire flowers, even though the completely ineffectual military used flamethrowers and napalm launchers that jammed at all of the most inconvenient moments. Everything in the dinosaur world sucks. They have one dirty and overpopulated city in the world that’s surrounded by a dessert and their cars don’t have brakes (even though one guy slams on them to keep from hitting a bob-omb). Everyone robs each other and life just generally seems to be terrible for everyone. I guess I can’t blame Koopa for wanting to take over Earth.
The acting isn’t the worst in the world and there’s some pretty decent talent here, not the least of which is a young, bad role choosing John Leguizamo and a clearly paycheck hungry Bob Hoskins (rest in peace knowing you did much better movies than this sir). This movie just really didn’t have to be made. The sad part is, this is even before the time of Uwe Boll and it was still a terrible adaptation. They honestly could gone for complete absurdity and left the half a**ed science at home. They could’ve removed the video game elements of the movie and called it something else, and it might’ve been appreciated more (probably not though). This was yet another movie I have watched and reviewed and I can only shake my head.
Also, why were Mario and Koopa the only ones who were transported by the dimensions merging? I feel like they were just really lazy about that. It was already bad enough hearing Mario constantly check to see if he was alive and saying things like: “I disintegrated! Am I here?” There was… You know what? I’m going to just go ahead and end this review right here. I can’t do this one anymore, there’s just way too much bad to keep going on without hating myself for watching this. I hope next week’s Retro Review is much MUCH better.
Jonathan Thomas Jones is a speculative fiction author and founder of geekhavenreviews.com. He has been passionate about all things geek for his entire life. See more about him at jonathanthomasjones.com and follow him on twitter @jtgloryjones.
