Let’s talk video game movies. Because sometimes you really do have nothing better than gawk at nonsense and wonder just how such things come about.
Videgames and movies have an…interesting relationship. You’d think because both are visual mediums, there’d be easy overlap. Hell, some video games, like most of the Metal Gear Solid titles and all the nonsense David Cage ever did, basically are movies with occasional interactivity. And you have those games that interweave complex story lines with that interactivity pretty well, including personal favorites of mine like Deus Ex and Mass Effect. So why have all the attempts to transfer this to the screen resulted predominantly in baffling mediocrity? Oh sure, you have gloriously entertaining silliness like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat Annihilation, but you also get some of the most unwatchable things I’ve ever seen in my life, like the Resident Evil series.
There’s of course notable exceptions, like the surprisingly solid Last of Us show lately. But for the most part, they’ve been along the veins of today’s subject—things that just leave you feeling totally baffled. Perhaps it’s because ultimately the very different presentation of games, requiring great condensing and compression, leaves too much lost—or perhaps it’s because most directors just don’t care. And this is just talking modern games with heavy story emphasis—let alone what we had in the eighties and early nineties, when most game storylines amounted to ‘bad guy stole your girlfriend, or something. Go kill ‘em all’. With that in mind, perhaps it’s a little understandable that the movie they chose to make from Super Mario Brothers turned out…strange.
The Mario games remain good fun to this day, but they were never exactly epic sweeping storylines. And with zero precedent for this, director Rocky Morton took a tale about a plumber rescuing a princess by jumping on turtles, and decided it’d be great to do something that, as the film’s intro shows, is about an alternate dimension caused by a meteorite impact wherein dinosaurs evolved into human-looking reptiles that now want to cross over into ours by stealing a diamond. Did I mention that the games involve magical mushrooms and funky leaves? That may explain a lot now.
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| There it is--the perfect expressions to sum up this flick. |
Our leads are the imaginatively christened Mario Mario (Bob Hoskins) and his younger brother Luigi Mario (played by…sigh…John Leguizamo), a pair of blue-collar plumbers in Brooklyn. We have an issue right away—Hoskins is phoning it in, pretty much, delivering every line like he’s severely constipated. Leguizamo is basically spending the whole thing also taaawking laik dis cuz hez fram Noo Yawk, and doesn’t really break away from the ‘wide-eyed younger dude’ mould.
Anyway, through a plot that’s far more complicated than it needs to be, they end up following a kidnapped geology student (Samantha Mathis) into another dimension where they find a dark cyberpunk version of Manhattan inhabited by dinosaur-human-people, ruled by their dictator Koopa, played by Dennis Hopper, because why wouldn’t he be!
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| I'd have the same look if they did that to my hair as well. |
Around here is where you can get all you need to know about the Mario movie. The set design is actually pretty atmospheric, there’s lots of detail, a lot of the animatronics are pretty memorable…but the storyline is completely all over the place, as is the tone. There’s one moment where we veer around from some kind of torture scene to cute moments with a little velociraptor, with whiplash so bad it almost broke my neck. There’s one utterly baffling moment where Hoskins hits a club (looking, as a friend of mine put it, pretty aptly like every balding Italian man still trying to play mack daddy) and has to…erm…seduce a lady to get his magic diamond, I think?
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| Here, Hopper begs one of the producers to let him off the project. |
Oh, and Dennis Hopper clearly is trying his best to have fun, even if like the audience, he doesn’t seem to have a clue what’s going on. There’s a subplot about his character’s evil wife trying to play Lady Macbeth, but it gets buried between the other half-dozen things struggling for plot relevance.
Eventually, of course, the day is saved and things are set up for a sequel that never came. This is a movie that obsesses a lot over dinosaurs, and wouldn’t you know it, 1993 saw another certain Spielberg movie all about dinosaurs that came out not long after this, and left it stomped into the ground like a Tyrannosaurus.
Overall, the Mario Bros movie is a film that left me feeling drunk even though I hadn’t touched any booze while watching it. There’s definitely technical talent at play here, with visuals you probably won’t forget, and it’s definitely memorably weird—but I’m at a loss to try to actually explain things coherently without coming off as a crazed lunatic. It’s almost like a stream of consciousness from someone on a kind of chemical cocktail, and in that regard at least, you might get some weird enjoyment out of it.
It’s taken thirty years for Nintendo to allow Hollywood another crack at one of their properties, with an animated Mario film now on the horizon—and perhaps that’s what it should’ve been all along, given the bright and colorful aesthetic at the games. Still, for what it is and what it represents, this film here is certainly unique—a train wreck it may be, but one that certainly leaves you fascinated as to how in the hell it came to this. Perhaps all the fungus in the movie give us hint enough…
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