A box office disaster that set the tone for years of video game misfires to come, 1993’s live-action “Super Mario Bros.” adaptation is as ambitious as it is confoundingly off the mark. In attempting to adapt one of the thinnest video game storylines at the time, the production team tried forcing the colorful world of the Nintendo classic through the dark lens (pipe?) of the most popular genre fare at the moment.
Producer Roland Joffé said of their vision, “This wasn’t Snow White and the Seven Dinosaurs. The dino world was dark. We didn’t want to hold back,” (per The Guardian). Unfortunately, the grit of 1990’s “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” film and Tim Burton’s “Batman” didn’t work so well here, and resulted in an uncomfortably grimey fantasy flick with an unrecognizable cast of characters wearing the lore and names of the game’s characters like uncanny skin suits.
All that being said, there are those even among our ranks here at /Film who feel that the film is far more interesting that most remember. It may be even more deserving of a reappraisal in the wake of Illumination’s serviceably faithful but almost defiantly bland animated adaptation, though not even the most generous watch could reveal anything more than the guiltiest and least pleasurable of guilty pleasure films.