What was the plot of the Super Mario Bros. movie? No, really, what happened?
We're the Mario Brothers, and our plumbing goes far. We had our own movie and... uh... there was a star...
I don't think the Super Mario Bros. Movie was very good. If I'm remembering correctly, it was quite bad, actually. If I remember. See, the thing about it as a film is that I'm sure I watched it, but I almost immediately special express delivered my recollection of it to the nearest Mushroom Kingdom trash pipe.
Let's try anyway. I'm going to do my best to remember The Plot of the film, and me from the future will make any necessary corrections before Nintendo's lawyers backwards long jump in and break my legs.
Once upon a time there was a Mario man, and he was very good at plumbing. He lived in the real world of New York and not the Mushroom Kingdom, which is stolen directly from the much better Super Mario Bros. movie made in 1993. Mario owns a plumbing business with his brother Luigi, and there's a large man named Spike who is better at plumbing. Or maybe he's just taller, I remember there being a lot of jokes about Mario being small, a real staple of the Super Mario video games. Little Mario Tiny-Pants, they call him that in Paper Mario, probably.
It's important to know that their life sucks and everyone hates them, so there can be an arc. Nobody wants to use their plumbing business, they get bullied, they're poor, and their family doesn't care if they live or die. It's funny when people are miserable. They spend all their money on a commercial so we can watch a bunch of references to the 1990s and to video games, I guess. Then the brothers go to fix the bathroom of an old lady who has a dog. The dog tries to murder them for no reason and this means they destroy the old woman's bathroom. Things don't look good for the Marios. This film spends so long setting up Mario's failing trade business considering it has nothing to do with either the video games or this movie.
Something happens here that leads both Mario and Luigi into the fantastical Mushroom Kingdom Nintendo universe. Was it a big pipe? Did they find a big pipe in the sewers that was actually a portal? If so, they also stole that from the 1993 movie.
Wait, I just remembered the scene at the start where the penguins had to fight Bowser, but then they just immediately lost, making their inclusion pointless. I guess that's the plot, Bowser is moving across the land taking over kingdoms and looking for the Super Star. For some reason the star is the MacGuffin, even though they're just an item in the games and Bowser already has the most powerful and unassailable army in the universe when the movie begins.
Actually, the penguins already had the Super Star. They gave it to the joke kingdom full of babies to protect it. Bowser has the star for the entire movie and does absolutely nothing with it, so that he can impress Princess Peach later. You could take the star out of the plot entirely and it would be the same movie. Better even! I'm so mad.
Luigi and Mario both get transported to the Nintendo universe, but separately, and Luigi ends up in Luigi's Mansion World with all the Dry Bones, eventually getting captured by Bowser. He gets tortured and put in a cage, and I know this all happens over the course of the first half of the film, but it feels like it all happened at once because none of it changes anything. Mario, meanwhile, gets to go to the happy Mushroom Kingdom and gets shown a bunch of Mario references by Toad, a series of scenes that also don't matter except to remind us that Mario hates mushrooms.
I forgot about that too, Mario hates mushrooms and won't eat them. Yeah, that's stupid. It doesn't matter much anyway.
Mario goes to the castle and meets Princess Peach but she's actually a girlboss in this version. She girlbosses Mario and talks about the war with Bowser, which everyone agrees is a lost cause. Uh, then it comes out that Bowser is scared of a moustached plumber, or something, and Princess Peach decides to train Mario to single-handedly go and defeat Bowser. Not girlboss enough to overcome the fact that Mario is the main character. Then there's a training montage!
Not quite right. Peach is going to make an alliance with the Kongs to defeat Bowser, and Mario is coming along because all the Toads are cowards. There's no evidence he will be at all useful, apart from being the main character of the movie.
Loads more Mario references here as they made the training course look like the actual Mario levels if they were very poorly designed. Neat. A viewer might think at this point that all of these obstacles and Mario moves will sure come in handy later in various fighting scenes. No, that never happens, as far as I can remember. Mario has to eat mushrooms to get big and powerful. Haha, video games; haha, he hate the mushroom. Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. He turns from a tubby 30-year-old imbecile into someone who can run exactly one obstacle course without fucking dying in a day, and they leave.
Actually, he doesn't even complete it once, and Peach takes him out of pity.
How far through the movie is this?
They travel to Donkey Kong land, where a lot of things definitely happened that I can't remember. Mario has to fight Donkey Kong to get them to help and then he does, somehow. It's getting a little blurry now.
Mario defeats Donkey Kong by putting on the cat suit. I wish it was more complicated than that, he literally just fucks around until he picks up the cat suit.
Everyone takes Mario Karts along the Mario Kart roads to the next scene. This is a great opportunity to play more licensed pop music, as the Mario games are not famous for their iconic music tracks. They fight things along the road, I think, and it steals a lot of ideas from Mad Max Fury Road. Then they get to...
This is where they...
According to the wiki for the movie, this is where there's a plan to craft their own karts and speed back to the Mushroom Kingdom. There are a lot of kart hijinks here that don't matter, and all the Kongs get captured except for Donkey Kong.
At some point they definitely go back to the Mushroom Kingdom and have a fight with Bowser. Each team throws references at the other team until one side wins. Kamek is there. Princess Peach bosses girlishly. A climactic scene occurs on a roof or a balcony, I'm sure of it. Bowser tries to marry Peach? I might be thinking of Super Mario Odyssey. They made Bowser really creepy in this film, but in the "guy you'd never accept a drink from in a club" way, not in the "scary dinosaur dictator" way. These scenes somehow lead to all the characters going to New York, which is, again, stolen from the 1993 film. Go watch the 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie, it's much better than you remember.
Peach and Toad return to the Mushroom kingdom and Bowser absolutely does propose to her. She agrees, because these stories only work if the girl puts herself in a position to be saved by the hero man. This part of the movie also includes a long scene where Mario and Donkey Kong fight and talk about having bad fathers, which I don't remember happening.There is then a long fight that is basically the same as I said except there's a Mario power-up reference every 10 seconds.
Mario gets beaten up but then SURPRISE it's the Super Star. Mario gets the Super Star and becomes an immortal god-being who easily defeats Incel Bowser. How? It's actually very strange that I can't even remember the big, cool ending attack that wins the fight. Probably a punch?
They get to New York when the movie steals from Marvel's Avengers and Mario takes a missile through the warp portal. This fight also includes a lot of unearned "the power of friendship" nonsense with Mario and Luigi working together. Then Bowser gets put in a jar.
Everyone congratulates Mario on being a Mario, and Bowser is sent back to Bowser Land or wherever it is that he goes when Mario beats him at the end of every game. I can't remember the credits at all, but I want to say they would have played some sort of hip hop or pop version of a Mario song.
I want to say there was a post-credits scene where they teased Yoshi for the sequel like when Kingsman needle-dropped Adolf Hitler, but I might have imagined it.
Yes. This happens.
It was actually more challenging to write the fact checks than to try and remember the film, as reading the synopsis was like someone telling you about a Mario-themed dream they had while you desperately push the button that opens the elevator doors. This is a 10-minute Newgrounds Mario animation stretched out over 92 minutes. The experience is the same as someone inviting you over to stare at their Super Mario memorabilia collection. If the plot was any thinner it would evaporate in direct sunlight. It's as if I ordered a Mario movie on Wish and instead they sent me a printed JPEG file of Mario doing a thumbs-up.
Even after writing this all down, I'm already forgetting what happened in the film. Watching it was like being put on hold. It is the film equivalent of realising you forgot to buy snacks. I hope you and I never think about it again.