(Apologies that this one is late - I messed up the scheduling! We'll be back to normal with the next review.)
Twenty years ago, a woman leaves her baby at a convent; she then flees to a tunnel where she is accosted by a threatening man, and killed in a rockfall.
In the 'modern day' of 1993, Mario and Luigi Mario are Italian-American brothers. They live in Brooklyn, New York, and run a plumbing business that is close to going broke due to the strongarm tactics of the Scapelli Construction, which has strong mob connections through its owner Anthony Scapelli.
The pair meet NYU student Daisy, who is digging under the Brooklyn Bridge for dinosaur bones. Daisy also has issues with Anthony Scapelli, as he wants the dinosaur dig closed up so be can develop the land.
All three are about to have much bigger problems than a local mob boss, though. You see, Daisy is the grown up version of the baby we saw at the beginning, and the man who was after her mother is still after her.
Well, I say "man". It's actually a but more complicated. You see, when a meteor hit Earth millions of years ago, it created a pocket dimension where the dinosaurs survived and went on to evolve into a humanoid race that is largely indistinguishable from humans. The "man" is President Koopa, overlord of the pocket dimension, and would-be conqueror of Earth. But the bridge between realities is not stable enough to do that. He needs Daisy to fix that.
And so Mario and Luigi must navigate the strange world of "Dinohattan", which is slowly being covered in a layer of fungus, staying one step ahead of President Koopa and his genetically devolved "Koopa Troopers" as they attempt to save not just Daisy, but the world as we know it.
Well first off: that plot summary sounds bonkers, right? And it basically is. But ... I'm not sure how any adaptation of the video game Super Mario Bros. could be anything else. I mean, the game has you play Mario Mario, a plumber who for some reason has been charged with saving the Princess of the Mushroom Kingdom from the evil, turtle-like Koopa. Which you do by jumping on their heads and collecting coins. Attempting to mangle together any kind of coherent movie plotline from that craziness is definitely going to be a mammoth task! Overall, I have to acknowledge that the film works hard to capture a lot of these elements in some way ... perhaps to its overall detriment, really. Perhaps trying to include fewer elements, but doing more with each, would have made it more accessible.
Of course, part of the reason for the poor reception is likely the fact that the movie was impacted by last minute script changes. Only weeks before filming was to begin, Disney bought the distribution rights and demanded significant re-writes. The result was apparently a very different movie than the cast had signed on to do, and a very different movie than the one for which the sets - which were already built - had been designed. The grimy, almost post-apocalyptic visual design of Dinohattan is definitely rather at odds with the film's often slapstick and goofy humour.
Finally, we have the backstage situation. And they all do their best with the material. But by all accounts the production was a horror show behind the scenes: both Hoskins and Hopper have used the word "nightmare" to describe the experience, and Hoskins in particular has called the film the worst job he's ever had, and the one thing in his career he would change if he could. This can hardly have been a good environment in which to create a film with any sense of joy. Which is definitely an emotion that's missing from the movie, as the script frequently stops to self-consciously try and justify the next bit of madness.
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