Across the history of cinematic screw-ups, few have been as notorious or lasting as 1993’s Super Mario Bros. The film – a loose adaptation of Nintendo’s hit platforming franchise, starring Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo – came to epitomise the “curse” of sub-par game-to-screen adaptations for decades. Hollywood simply didn’t understand video games. Hoskins was oblivious to the film’s origins until he’d already signed on, and who could blame him? Even if he had played the games, the murky, off-putting crime fantasy was unrecognisable from the eye-poppingly colourful frivolity that inspired it. Thirty years later and the Mario games have been adapted again. But this time The Super Mario Brothers Movie suffers from the opposite problem: it understands video games far, far too well.
In many ways, the new children’s feature, released in cinemas this week, is the antithesis not just of the 1993 version, but of every shoddy video-game adaptation that trudged in its footsteps. Whether we’re talking zany action films (1995’s Mortal Kombat), grimy horrors (2004’s Resident Evil: Apocalypse), third-rate fantasies (2010’s Prince of Persia) or… whatever the hell Assassin’s Creed (2017) was, video games have inspired a host of the worst Hollywood films in recent memory. What these films all have in common is an abject failure to reproduce what it is people found so fun about the games in the first place. The Super Mario Brothers Movie – a co-production between Illumination studio and Nintendo themselves – knows intimately what it is gamers are looking for in a Mario film, and it provides it in spades. Filmmaking, though, has never been about ticking boxes.
