What do you get when you combine a cartoony Japanese video game with 80s action? You get Super Mario Bros! Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo star as Mario and Luigi, respectively. They're grimy plumbers from Brooklyn who encounter a girl, Daisy. She is kidnapped into an alternate dimension run by King Koopa (Dennis Hopper), and so, in typical fashion, Mario & Luigi must save the princess to save the day. Super Mario Bros is an odd clash. On a very shallow level, it's based on Mario--it has Koopas, Goombas, mushrooms, bob-ombs, etc, although most are in name only. Otherwise, it's Cannon Film meets dark fantasy world. It's like someone described the Mario games in Japanese, translated it to English, and sent it to a writer who adapted it into the most popular Hollywood genre at the time. If you're going to compare its fidelity to the video games, you're in for a bad time. On the other hand, if you're looking for a wildly different take on the Mario universe, Super Mario Bros delivers. It's a dark, creepy, twisted mess that brings action movie "realism" (and industrial grating) to a complete fantasy land, but with that "realism" comes the logical inconsistencies, plot holes, poor characterizations and dialogue. This movie is Nintendo platformer meets Sega Genesis shoot 'em up, and as sacrilegious as that sounds, I liked it.
6/10--Maybe a little generous, but it deserves to be offset a little bit from the hate parade.
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