The live-action Super Mario Bros. movie was even weirder than I remembered

The Super Mario Bros. Movie: Bringing out the dinosaurs into the world with a meteorite, and introducing the dinosaur on the SNES

If you’ve played through games like Super Mario World or Super Mario Odyssey, then the general shape of The Super Mario Bros. Movie’s plot will be obvious from the moment you first hear why Bowser’s so hell-bent on getting his hands on a certain star-shaped MacGuffin. The movie works because it is making its various worlds feel like living, breathing, organic places that you would want to spend hours exploring if they were parts of a Mario story, since it is building toward its logical and traditional Mario ending. It’s cool as hell every single time someone’s outfit transforms after they ingest mushroom power-ups, but it’s things like being able to see each of the individual seeds on a fire flower’s face flicking like a candle that really make you appreciate how hard the movie’s working to get things “right.”

First, it might be a good thing to put the film’s release in context. Live-action movies were much more inventive in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Disney has ruined that term by its unnecessary takes on the classics. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the Flintstones were brought to life by cool costumes and elaborate set designs, back then. A child was made to believe that these fictional words were real when they watched the movies.

Here’s the premise: 65 million years ago, the meteor that killed the dinosaurs actually transported them to a parallel realm, where they evolved in isolation from the rest of the Earth. Somehow, they became humans but with some lizard-y features. Dennis Hopper plays King Koopa, who is supposed to be the one who dreamt of merging the world’s Dinosaurs together so that he could take away the Earth’s natural resources. To do that, he needs a piece of the meteorite that is in our world because a dino egg was brought here years ago, and it hatched out what would eventually be Princess Daisy, who grew up to be a paleontologist.

To be clear, this sounds nothing like any Mario Bros. game. A charitable reading would suggest that the dinosaur stuff was pulled from Super Mario World on the SNES, which took place in a world called Dinosaur Land and, more importantly, introduced the world to Yoshi. In the movie, a small raptor named Yoshi doesn’t babysit Baby Mario at any point. That is a stretch. Instead, it feels like a bunch of action movie cliches with some Super Mario references forced in.

This is mostly still true even when the brothers are factored in. Mario and Luigi — played by Hoskins and John Leguizamo — are pulled into the drama after they attempt to rescue Daisy (Samantha Mathis), who is being sought after by Koopa’s goons. It is not clear what the royal family of the Mushroom Kingdom looks like, but she is important. Mario and Luigi end up traveling to the parallel dimension, which is kind of like Mad Max as envisioned by Jim Henson, a sprawling metropolis surrounded by a lifeless desert.

That attitude’s what gets the brothers up every morning and inspires them to go out into the world in search of bill-paying gigs. But it’s also why they’re both so game when they unexpectedly get sucked into the adventure of a lifetime by way of a mysterious green pipe hidden somewhere deep in New York City’s sewer system.

This ends up being the case with most of The Super Mario Bros. Movie’s complex set pieces, which doesn’t come as a surprise given Illumination’s track record and Nintendo’s reputation for being extremely protective of its brands. What does come as something of a shock, though, is how genuinely inoffensive (which is to say “not off-putting”) Pratt and Day’s takes on Mario and Luigi are — a concern the movie addresses head-on with some solid gags and a textual explanation as to why Mario occasionally sounds like he might have spent some time in Pawnee, Indiana.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie also stars Seth Rogen, Fred Armisen, Sebastian Maniscalco, and Charles Martinet. The movie’s slated to hit theaters on April 5th.