I shouldn’t be talking about the 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie right now. In fact, I’m kind of sorry for even bringing it up. It’s 2026, Nintendo is firmly in a new era of cinematic adaptations of their popular video games, a second animated Super Mario Bros. movie is about to launch (which will almost certainly be a wildly successful product like the first), and a big-budget, live-action Zelda movie is in production as we speak. Dredging up an ancient Nintendo movie failure – one that is a thoroughly beaten Yoshi-shaped horse by now – feels both cruel and irresponsible, like being at your friend’s wedding and telling everyone about the time he threw up in front of the entire class in middle school. Everyone should have moved on by now.
But sometimes it’s important to think about where someone started so you can reflect on how far they’ve come, and video game movies have mostly improved since the live-action Super Mario Bros. movie was released to poor reviews, a very muted box office reception, and a lot of confused fans (with even more confused parents) over 30 years ago.
But hey, let’s start with some positives. Despite so much of Super Mario Bros. being a baffling interpretation of the source material, Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo’s take on real-life Mario and Luigi going on an interdimensional road trip/rescue mission actually works. Their banter is frequently charismatic, endearing, and fun, even if it’s mostly quips and catchphrases as hallucinatory nonsense unravels around them. They’ve got great chemistry and they’re believable as two Italian American brothers bickering and bantering as they attempt to run a failing, family-owned Brooklyn plumbing business out of a van that barely works. (And that’s even before they get pulled into an alternate universe and everything goes crazy.) If that setup sounds familiar, it’s because it’s essentially the same in the far more successful 2023 animated The Super Mario Bros. Movie – an interesting coincidence considering plumbing companies and broken-down utility vehicles aren’t ever really explored in the video games.
It’s a good thing that the dynamic between Mario and Luigi functions as well as it does since nearly everything around them increasingly seems to get more insane, bizarre, and distant from the source material. Super Mario Bros. plays out like someone quickly read the back of the box of a Super Mario game and cobbled together something that attempts to fill in the narrative blanks with total nonsense, wrapped in set pieces that mix the gritty New York street culture of the first live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie with Blade Runner’s dystopian future — none of which really makes any sense for Super Mario. Fantastical and psychotic things either happen as if they’re totally normal and commonplace, or they’re explained literally and in excruciating detail, a balance perfectly encapsulated by the film’s opening minutes where a voiceover gives us the history of the dinosaurs, followed by a flashback to a group of nuns receiving an orphaned egg… that hatches into a human girl. Why? No one knows, but it’s possibly because one of the writers saw a picture of Daisy and another picture of Yoshi and decided they should be the same species.
This is technically a movie review, so I am now going to attempt to explain the plot. Deep breath: Two brothers living in Brooklyn meet a woman whose job it is to dig up dinosaur bones under the Brooklyn Bridge, because obviously that’s where the most dinosaur bones are, and because the engineers who build bridges somehow didn’t find them despite there being so many bones down there. And also they have no problem with people digging for dinosaur bones under functional bridges because that seems safe and fine for everyone involved. The woman gets kidnapped by two vaguely Italian guys from another dimension and the two slightly less vaguely Italian brothers fall through a magical illusory wall to find her, landing themselves in a manic lizard-themed version of Manhattan where everything is covered in wet webs. From there, a villain leader who orders fast food using a gun pointed at his television makes everyone’s life slightly difficult because he wants the woman’s necklace, and he also does evolution experiments on his employees, which they all seem OK with. The brothers then have to save the woman, defeat the villain, and learn several things about dinosaurs that aren’t applicable to reality.
