Product: Super Mario Bros. [VHS] (1993)
Rating: 4.0
Goofy, but in a good way
Super Mario Bros. / B00008979N*Spoilers*I watched this movie as a child and remember liking the movie, but being a touch confused. The Super Mario Brothers games that I played had involved a plumber, traveling through pipes, jumping to incredible heights, and rescuing a princess (perpetually in another castle!) in a crown and a dress. In order to make the concept work as a movie, however, the filmmakers understandably had to change up the plot a tad.In retrospect, this really is not such a bad movie, and it holds up fairly well for the time period. Hoskins is wonderful, as always, reprising much of his role fromWho Framed Roger Rabbit, here as the grumpy, world-weary, heart-of-gold Mario. The actors for Luigi and Princess Daisy are less well-rounded and much of their parts come off as somewhat cheesy, but since their characters are supposed to be wide-eyed romantics, the cheese is not too painful.The basic overlay of the plot is that our world and the Mushroom Kingdom world are two dimensions, separated by a divergence in the far past in which one world evolved with primates as the dominant life-form and the other world evolved with reptiles as the dominant life-forms. (It is particularly fascinating to see this movie treat evolution as a bland fact that even children can understand, when today the issue is considered to be so extremely controversial as to be potentially off-putting to some audiences.) When the reptilian world suffers a military coup, the infant Princess Daisy is smuggled out to the human world for her own safety. Years later, the grown-up Daisy is sucked back into her home world - along with two hapless plumbers. In this world something akin toBlade RunnerorTotal Recall, the plumbers must move quickly in order to save Princess Daisy, defeat the evil King Koopa, and restore the rightful king to the throne.If the plot sounds corny, that's because it is, but it is intentionally corny, going along with the craziness and enjoying it along the way. The viewer is sucked in by the sheer craziness of the whole thing, and Hoskins is a superb element, having mastered the art of treating the absurd as unavoidable fact, while still humorously seething along the way at being made ridiculous. In this way - as a celebration of the ridiculous - the movie can still hold its own today in ways that more true-to-source video games of the era cannot. This is a decent movie if you are looking for a trip down memory lane, for decent home-style MST3K riffing, or for young children who will enjoy the bright colors and loud noises along the way.~ Ana Mardoll