Super Mario Bros. is the first movie based on a video game to have ever been made here in America, which is fitting since Mario is basically the mascot for video games as a whole. I think this is important to know, because the one thing I can forgive the Super Mario Bros. movie for is that there was no precedent for how to adapt a video game into a movie. Hollywood didn’t know what audiences would want from it, and video games are so difficult to adapt into movies anyway because of the completely different structures involved. Plus, you’re not exactly working with easily adaptable material when your first effort is a Super Mario Bros. movie, so I don’t see a world where this movie could have been any good. With that being said, the Super Mario Bros. movie has gone on to become known as one of the worst movies of all time, and I mean…it’s easy to see why.

All right, with the gracious platitudes out of the way, let’s tear this movie apart now. So, you know how in the Mario games we have a man in red overalls adventuring his way through the Mushroom Kingdom to rescue a princess from an evil giant turtle? Yeah, that’s not what’s happening here. Mario and his brother (or…son, apparently? This is never really clear.) are plumbers in Brooklyn, and while this was just a throwaway detail in the Mario lore, they REALLY lean into it here. Anyway, there’s apparently a giant plotline about the extinction of the dinosaurs having not really gotten rid of the dinosaurs, but rather just put them in a different dimension, or…something? It doesn’t really make a ton of sense. But the leader in this other dimension is King Koopa, who is trying to merge the two dimensions so that they can reign on Earth once again. Because of this, a girl named Daisy is kidnapped and brought into this other dimension, and so Mario and Luigi travel there to save here.

On the surface, you can read this and think that it’s somewhat of a decent effort into adapting the game as a movie storyline, but it’s in all the details where things just fall apart. I think the ultimate downfall of Super Mario Bros. is just that its leads are terrible. Mario and Luigi are played by Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo, who aren’t inherently bad actors, but they’re just terrible in this. One could easily argue that the reason for this is most likely due to the terrible material they had to work with, but it’s just frustratingly bad. When I hear them deliver their lines, I just want to rip all of my hair out with how stupid it all sounds. Plus, the characterizations just piss me off. Mario is just this gruff, overweight, balding middle-aged man who does not look like the kind of man you’d want rescuing you if you were a princess, while Luigi looks like some weird idiot who is half the age and half the IQ of his older brother.

And my God, the dialogue is just so bad. I’m not kidding, there are some movies that have bad jokes in them or dumb lines, but I can usually forgive them in an otherwise good movie. In fact, sometimes it can be endearing. But in Super Mario Bros., the jokes actually anger me, to the point where I felt my blood pressure rising while watching the movie.

Super Mario Bros. is a case where you have bad writing, bad performances, bad set designs, and just an overall bad adventure wrapped up into one bad movie. Like I said, I can recognize that this movie was the first of its kind, and so on one hand I sometimes don’t feel like it deserves to be the punching bag it’s become. But then I watch it, and the movie is just so bad that I don’t even think it deserves the benefit of being the first. I saw this movie as a kid and didn’t like it then, and usually as a kid you like everything. That alone should say enough, but now I watched it as an adult and thought that it couldn’t possibly be as bad as I was remembering it. But if anything, it was even worse. Make no mistake people, the only redeemable thing about the Super Mario Bros. movie is that it helped set a precedent for what a bad video game movie is. Otherwise, this is garbage of the highest magnitude, and offensively bad if you’re actually a fan of the source material like I am.

1/5