Game On: Super Mario Bros (Dir Annabel Jankel & Rocky Morton, 1h44m, 1993)

The road to hell, as I've said before, is paved with bad video game adaptions. Before prestige TV adaptions like The Last of Us, Arcane: League of Legends and Fallout, there were the dark times, where to be a videogame adaption meant critical, and often financial failure. We called them...the 1990s. And early 2000s. And the rest of the 2000s. And...you get the picture. Bad cinematic and television adaptions of videogames remain common, we've just got better at making good ones too. How? Why? When did this all start? The other motive for this season, dear readers, is a slight redressing of balances: it has been nearly two years since my last "Neutral" rating, and nearly a year since my last "Avoid". Something must be done; one cannot live by cinematic Cordon Bleu alone, and thus, over the next month we will tuck into that most unpalatable of cinematic junk food, the video game movie.

What better place to start than Super Mario Bros; no, not the likeable if rote 2023 The Super Mario Bros Movie-but its older brother, the bizarre, tonally inconsistent, conceptually dead-on-arrival 1993 live action adaption in which Bob Hoskins' Mario and John Leguizamo's Luigi must rescue Princess Daisy (Samantha Mathis) from the clutches of Dennis Hopper at his most punchclock performance, channelling Donald Trump as villainous King Koopa. For anyone who hasn't played a Mario game over the last forty plus years, this is, with minor adjustments - Daisy replacing Princess Peach, presumably because no-one in their right minds would call a child in late 20th Century NYC "Peach", and Bowser going under his original Japanese name of King Koopa - the plot of most of the Mario "canon". 

It'sa Me! Luigi (John Leguizamo) and Mario (Bob Hoskins)

In rough concept, this is precisely what happens in every Mario game. In execution, things immediately go awry, and do not improve. Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel directed exactly three things that were not music videos or concert movies, and they are this, middling neo-noir D.O.A (1988) and Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future TV Movie, whose style and aesthetic leaches weirdly into Super Mario Bros in places. Moreover, the basic Mario game plot is immediately upended following bad animated dinosaurs - Jurassic Park would be one of many films thrashing it in the box office within a fortnight of its release - as Hoskins, narrating, reveals that the meteor did not kill the dinosaurs but instead threw them into a parallel dimension where they have, of course, evolved, formed their own version of Manhattan, and where King Koopa now seeks Princess Daisy and the part of the meteor she owns. 

If this wasn't enough, we're basically then stuck with Mario and Luigi for the best part of twenty minutes of slow-moving character-and-plumbing-centric action. Hoskins and Leguizamo are not, in themselves bad, and certainly apparently enjoyed bon-homme together getting drunk between filming -what else could anyone do? - it's more that nobody involved with this film - two thirds of the script team seem to have never worked again after this and the final third is Ed Solomon of Bill and Ted, and also the dire 2000s Charlie's Angels fame - seems to know what Mario and Luigi are supposed to be like. Hoskins has a fatherly warmth, Luigi is more reckless and it is he that initially befriends and later leads the charge to rescue Daisy.

Game Over: Dennis Hoppper's King Koopa is one of innumerable things wrong with Super Mario Bros

Nobody involved in this production seems to have laid eyes on a Mario game, for that matter, for, following this prolonged introduction, our heroes and Daisy meet, and soon find themselves in -sigh- Dinohattan. Thus we arrive at the nadir of what amounts to the Super Mario Bros experience, the simple fact that everyone from our directors down are not especially interested in making a Mario movie, but would rather be doing a family friendly version of Brazil, featuring characters and concepts vaguely lifted from one of the most famous video game franchises of the decade. Thus, the middle of the film involves itself with -sigh- Dinohattan, a location largely festooned with strands of mushroom that only heighten its artificiality, where someone, presumably our directors, took one look at 1982's Blade Runner, and decided what it needed was fungal infestation. 

Here, we are properly introduced to King Koopa, wherein Dennis Hopper is basically on autopilot for most of his scenes as the lizard king, and he and his sidekicks bumble around whilst Mario and Luigi have the film's MacGuffin stolen from them by a woman in fetish gear named Bertha - otherwise missing from the Mario canon - and track her down to what, in footage thankfully excised from the movie, is fairly obviously a strip club. This is odd enough for 1993, today it's even weirder and again, makes you question every other decision in the filmmaking process. This strangeness is nothing compared to the film's other MacGuffin, the (d)evolution gun, which provides the film's with its unsettling, if technologically impressive "Goomba" mooks, their tiny heads curiously perched on top of colossal bodies. Like everything else, including the other technologically impressive effect, Yoshi, they look nothing like the game character. 

There is little to redeem Super Mario Bros, and even less to recommend it to even the most hardcore of fans

Nothing in this movie feels like Mario either, especially not the confusing B-Plot of political uprising in the Mushroom(?) Kingdom, in which Fiona Shaw and singer Mojo Nixon, a replacement for Tom Goddamn Waits, feature heavily. By the time that the film arrives at any semblance of the Mario plot, its so ramshackle that it barely registers, a barely coherent mess of ideas, names, concepts cribbed off a Nintendo employee and sub Gillam-oddness playing out in front of you, having about as much to do with a beloved videogame franchise as the Ninja Turtles have to do with the Renaissance. Small wonder Nintendo have been markedly guarded about adaptions of their work, the The Super Mario Bros Movie taking thirty years and tight control from Nintendo on production, returning Mario to animated figure, whilst their second live action adaption of their work after this film won't come until 2027's Legend of Zelda film.

Is there anything redeeming about Super Mario Bros? No. Mario's creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, nailed the film's Achilles heel back in 2007, noting it had become "a movie that was about a videogame, rather than being an entertaining movie in and of itself", and it certainly, even for the most intrepid Mario fans, remains a curio at best. At worst, it is a film that fundamentally fails at every level of being an adaption, and otherwise barely functions as a movie, a brain-numbing chore of a watch that has none of the inventiveness and a complete absence of the charm of Mario's gaming adventures.

Rating: Avoid

Super Mario Bros is available to buy on DVD and BluRay from ‎ Metrodome Distribution and is available to stream in the UK from Amazon Prime.

Next week, to the arcades, as a villain trying to take over the world against JCVD et al as martial artists battle for the fate of the world, in Street Fighter