SUPER MARIO BROTHERS. Directed by Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel; written by Parker Bennett, Terry Runte and Ed Solomon; produced by Jake Eberts and Roland Joffe. Starring Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo, Samantha Mathis and Dennis Hopper. Rated PG.
More reviews by —
TITLE:
RATING:
Super Mario Brothers has its heart in the right place. Problem is, very little else is right about this supposed transfer of the popular video game to the big screen.
The cast is fine, with almost all of the actors playing their parts convincingly and with a lot of appeal. Hoskins and Leguizamo as Mario and Luigi, and Mathis, as the princess Daisy who the brothers try to rescue, are particularly good.
And everyone knows Hopper can be a great bad guy. Unfortunately, his character here, the evil king Koopa, isn't very well-written. Hopper's villains are best when played with some subtlety, but Koopa is all overacting.
But the story is the most out-of-sync thing about Super Mario Brothers. Now, not much of a story could be gleaned from the mostly repetitive "adventures" of the game characters.
But I can't help thinking that watching a really ace Nintendo player "beat the game" would be much more entertaining than trying to keep up with the helter-skelter plotline of the movie.
Humanoid creatures descended from dinosaurs, living in a parallel dimension; "de-evolution" machinery that changes some higher life forms into lizards, some into fungus and some into monkeys; a magic meteorite shard that will allow Koopa to take over our dimension—give me a break.
Little kids are the only ones who would enjoy the various creatures the brothers meet and the predictable situations they find themselves in. But could they actually be expected to follow such a wildly contrived storyline?
In addition, this bizarre story requires that the backgrounds for the action look more like low-rent Blade Runner than the familiar, usually cheerful, settings of the various video game levels. The oppressively weird look of the movie was what I found most disappointing.
To be fair, the youngest members of the audience when I saw Super Mario Brothers seemed to be enjoying themselves. But I can't imagine that their parents or older sibs were.
June 23, 1993