Super Mario Bros. (1993) sends its Nintendo stars on an absurd big-screen adventure
Upon its release in 1993, our critic praised this famous flop of a video game adaptation for its inventive production design and Dennis Hopper’s deranged performance as villain King Koopa, but was less forgiving of Mario and Luigi
What upsets people most about the idea of this film is the failure of cinematic nerve it seems to embody: it’s as if Hollywood had decided it can’t beat the Japanese game giants and their sinister hold over our healthy Western youth. so it might as well join them. It is more constructive to see Super Mario Bros. as its makers are inclined to, “ln the great tradition of comic book superheroes come to life”. When producer Roland Joffe watched his son playing the Nintendo game on which the film is surprisingly loosely based, “It began to seem like a very creative thing to try to bring these cultural icons to life and dramatise the imaginary world of their adventures”: If it keeps Mr Joffe from making more overblown tosh like The Mission, then who are we to argue?
Product placement has taken the cinema by stealth. In the case of Super Mario Bros. the reverse is true. The welcome surprise of this film is that it doesn’t just slavishly obey the dictates of the game-deviser’s peculiar imaginations. The plot does embody the freedom from logic that is one of the game-world’s biggest selling points, but it does so in a surprisingly cinematic way. Production designer David Snyder’s boast that “There are more than 100 game elements in the film, waiting to be counted by keen-eyed and dedicated fans” will make hearts sink among non-devotees, but movie trainspotters not suffering from Nintendo finger might derive just as much pleasure from ticking off the absurd number of film references from a checklist including Robocop, Superman, Star Wars and The Wizard of Oz.
This obsessive allusiveness is obviously not a good thing in itself, and the film would have been more fun if directors Morton and Janke! had attempted to fashion a serious emotional drama around the raw material of the Mario story. But genuine inventiveness occasionally rears its head among the blockbusting detritus. Dinohattan in particular, though rather weakly-named, turns out to be an urban dystopia worthy of Ridley Scott or Richard Stanley, and also a subversive hint at what our own cities are going to end up looking like if we continue wasting all our fossil fuels playing video games.
One and a half square miles of plywood went into the making of Super Mario Bros, and that was just for the performances. Dennis Hopper, the arch villain with the amphibian’s tongue and the ‘Punk’s not dead’ haircut, is the only one who really enjoys himself. He seems to actively relish the absurd amount of exposition he is contracted to supply – investing lines like “Muster the Goombasl” with existential significance. Bob Hoskins, on the other hand, sleepwalks through the lead, but then he’s seen all this before with Roger Rabbit.
The film’s younger stars John Leguizamo (Hangin’ with the Homeboys) and Samantha Mathis (Pump up the Volume) have yet to establish themselves so firmly and it is to be hoped they have not done lasting damage to their promising careers with the terminally wet Luigi and Daisy. She is initially fine in the Princess Leia role, but struggles a bit once forced out of her feisty student garb and into a less than empowering purple night-dress. Worse still, she is also obliged to befriend a ctre dinosaur called Yoshi. Leguizamo at least gets to deliver Super Mario Bros’ great rallying cry to the children of the world – “Trust the Fungus!”
- This review was first published in Sight and Sound, August 1993.