. . . is a deep fake mash-up of the Super Mario Bros movie, the SNES game Shadowrun, and Regarding Henry, wherein Mario and Luigi are NYC plumbers struggling to make ends meet during an economic downturn.
Luigi tries to keep the business on track, but big brother Mario keeps wasting money on expeditions deep into the subway system to discover a secret underground kingdom ruled by totalitarian, intelligent dinosaurs. These dino-men are clearly fascists, but they prefer to be called 'paleoconservatives.' Mario's girlfriend disappeared without a trace three years ago leaving him with nothing but a fantasy that she was kidnapped by evil dino-men and only Mario can rescue her.
Mario blows the company budget on nonsensical 'side scroller' devices that he claims will allow him and Luigi to project themselves into elaborate graffiti art pieces that contain extradimensional warp routes that'll plug them straight into dino-fascist HQ. Mario describes an elaborate vision of a fortress filled with fire deep underground where he believes his 'precious peach' is held captive.
Meanwhile, Luigi starts pulling debt collection jobs for a local mob kingpin known only as 'Mr. Drake,' which results in Luigi having to brutalize innocent people. Luigi starts to hate himself, but can't tell anyone about his criminal 'extra life.'
One evening, Luigi is leaning on a corner store proprietor for protection money when an obnoxious asshole lawyer named Henry Jake Armitage blusters into the store for a pack of cigarettes and verbally abuses Luigi as a target of convenience. Luigi snaps and shoots Armitage in the head and bolts, leaving the lawyer for dead.
The rest of the movie crosscuts between two parallel stories:
Armitage recovering from being shot in the head, and struggling to regain the use of his body via physical therapy and psychological counseling;
and an increasingly desperate and unhinged Luigi pulling ever-riskier bank jobs while using his ill-gotten funds to construct an ever-expanding underground fantasy playground for Mario to roleplay his scenarios of defeating the dino-fascists and rescuing his 'precious peach.'
Armitage-who was a hard-driving mercenary lawyer working in the shadows of the legal system to benefit greedy mega-corporations-finds a new life of love and gentleness and contemplation. Luigi's bullet robbed him of his old asshole self and ironically gave him the opportunity to rebuild himself from scratch as a kinder soul.
Luigi and Mario both perish in an accidental explosion that occurs when they try to contrive a 'fire and lava castle' as per Mario's delusions.
Final scene: Armitage in a tiny apartment-he started the film with a big-ass luxury suite-painting a 'fire flower' in gentle watercolors as a television set plays an old episode of The Naked City . . .
"There are eight million stories in the Naked City, and this has been one of them . . ."
Roll credits over a soothing Philip Glass score.
