Adaptation Insanity: The one that was the first video game movie

 

 

Title: Super Mario Bros

What Year?: 1993

Classification: Improbable Experiment

Rating: What The Hell??? (2/4)

 

As I write this, it’s the end of a weekend, and I have once again been debating between several movies to review. This time around, however, I knew I wanted to get in a second entry in my newest feature before another one went by, and the one at the top of the list is pretty much the reason it exists at all. As a further twist, I swear I was ready to do this before the para-franchise blew up pop culture (and inspired me to write an actual novel in six weeks…). Without further ado, I present Super Mario Bros, the live-action version, and very possibly the reason it took three decades to get another one.

Our story begins with an introduction to an alternate universe where dinosaurs survived, and a baby left on an orphanage’s doorstep. We then jump forward and meet the brothers Mario and Luigi, whose last name is revealed to be Mario, two struggling New York plumbers. In the course of their work, Luigi has a meet-cute with a woman named Daisy, who leads the brothers to a portal to another dimension. They discover a soft-cyberpunk universe where dinosaurs evolved into sentient humanoids, which coexist with another race evolved from fungi. A conflict is in progress between the dino leader King Koopa and the loyalists of the Mushroom King, who has devolved into a filmy encrusting organism vastly more intriguing than anything else here. Of course, Koopa’s plans include taking Daisy hostage. It’s up to the brothers to save the day in the mildest possible way, and if you’re wondering what this has to do with the game besides the name, you poor bastards…

Super Mario Bros was a 1993 science fantasy film by Hollywood Pictures, based on the video game series by Nintendo. It was the first live-action theatrical film to be based on a video game. (I know, you can argue over The Last Starfighter...) The production reportedly went through a troubled development and further conflicts over intended audience and possible rating. The film went into production with Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel as directors. The cast was led by the late Bob Hoskins as Mario and Dennis Hopper (d. 2010) as King Koopa, with John Leguizamo as Luigi and Samantha Mathis as Daisy. Lance Henriksen appeared very briefly as the restored King. The score was composed by Alan Silvestri (see Mac And Me, Predator 2, etc, etc, etc). The film was a commercial failure, earning $38.9 million against a budget of up to $48M, and received mixed to unfavorable reviews. Hoskins claimed that he had been repeatedly injured and endangered during filming. The film was released on VHS in 1994 and several times on DVD, but fell out of print in the US after 2010. It is not currently available for authorized digital streaming in the US.

For my experiences, what stands out about this one is that I can very clearly remember following reactions to it when it came out, and I can attest that at the time, it really wasn’t that big a deal. Plenty of people were saying it was bad, plenty more was said about how much money was lost (in hindsight before there was really a frame of reference for the cost of post-1980s movies), but if one went by contemporary reactions, it was easy to conclude that it was nothing more or less than a typical early 1990s action movie. Needless to say, the fact that I am talking about it now is the surest proof that this was the one thing it was not. The crowning irony is, everything I have to say now is from three viewings over the last 5 years or so, and my own reaction is and always was that it wasn’t that big a deal either way. (Hey, I knowingly watched Inseminoid more than once, my brain is broken…)

Moving forward, what I have to say on the established vein is that this really is as close as it could have been to a “mainstream” Nineties movie. In those terms, it holds the line at average and regularly rises to decent or genuinely impressive. The story is solid and simple, with enough wild cards for real surprises. The cast is genuinely good, with Hopkins and Hopper pulling their weight and Leguizamo and Mathis being actually cute. (I realized in the course of my parody novel that I must have made up the Luigi/ Daisy pairing independent of anything I would have known about.) As a bonus, the villains and heroes are both reasonably competent, to the point that Koopa thinks to use his de-evolution machine to power up his minions. What really makes the film memorable is the quite well-realized grunge dystopia, which manages the cyberpunk feel while the genre was really still coming into its own in the live-action medium. The result is some hit-and-miss gags (a bit with an egg in a stroller is just weird) balanced against a world that actually works well enough for the bystanders to remain focused on getting on with their lives.

And if you were sensing a big qualifier, this is the kind of movie that will put “Not bad, but-!” on my tombstone. (It’s that or, “Don’t watch Shanks.”) The real problems with the movie tend to come in when it tries to reference the games, which tends to make even less sense if you actually know what they are referencing. The most obvious offense is the ludicrous tiny-headed design of the Goombas and the completely unnamed and unexplained creatures that appear to be Koopa troopers. (An extra distraction comes from the unnervingly inhuman masked worker drones toward the end, which feel like they wandered in from a Konami game.) Even worse are the moments when the movie tries to shift to a slapstick tone that someone presumably thought would appeal to kids, always telegraphed by wonky music that sounds like the very recognizable Silvestri (see my Predator 2 soundtrack post, again) riffing on himself. An extra rant is in order for that damn fungus, which is genuinely developed into a very intriguing concept of decentralized intelligence, but still gets used mostly for gags. The very brief appearance of the legendary Henriksen (I kind of forgot I actually reviewed Terminator) feels like an unintentionally fitting epitaph for the creature and the film.

Now I’m up to the “one scene”, there is truly one that will stay with you whether you like it or not, and it is the elevator sequence. (See The Lift???) As we build toward the finale, the brothers must sneak into an elevator to infiltrate King Koopa’s lair. When the Goombas and Koopas start to board, the heroes simply hide behind the bizarrely proportioned creatures. Just when it becomes clear that this could be a problem, Luigi notices that the elevator music is playing “Somewhere My Love” (aka the theme from the 1960s-scandalous film Dr. Zhivago). Our protagonists try nudging two of the creatures enough to turn their awkward shuffling into something like a dance. It quickly spreads, until the lot of them are dancing and grunting or humming to the music as the brothers climb out the top of the elevator like they could have at the beginning. The touch that makes the scene is that the creatures are still dancing when the doors open on their evident superior, who calls them to attention. It’s weird, random and unnecessary, and for the brief time it lasts, it’s exactly what a movie like this needs.

In closing, what I find myself coming to is what 1980s-‘90s video games really meant to kids like me. As I ranted when I was reviewing the cartoon, to us, even the cartoony fantasies of the later Mario games were something we took seriously. It’s a testament to their strength that they have held up longer and better than the vast majority of the romances and dramas that were supposed to be our window on the “adult” world. With that context, I can at least appreciate what this movie was trying to do. After years of being talked down to in watered-down cartoons (have I mentioned I saw the Battletoads pilot?), seeing our heroes as adults in a functional society was exactly what we were waiting for. At the same time, it is quite clear that it failed, and probably would have even without the external pressure to be “kid-friendly”. The only really good options here were an over-the-top romp like Flash Gordon or a full deconstruction like Hancock, but the Hollywood “mainstream” was simply not ready for either when it came to video games. What we got instead, as laid out, was a decent movie knocking on the door of either good or “so bad it’s good”. With that, I can offer my respects and move on. Punch it, Bishop!