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Super Mario Bros. (1993)



Super Mario Bros. (1993)




3/10




Starring
Bob Hoskins
John Leguizamo
Dennis Hopper
Samantha Mathis


Directed by Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel


After seeing the Honest Trailer on Screen Junkies (YouTube), I just had to go look for this film. Reading more about the movie on Wikipedia didn’t help—it just made me more curious.

This is a movie Bob Hoskins (who plays Mario) called "the worst thing I ever did." In a 2007 interview with The Guardian, he answered Super Mario Bros. to three questions: "What is the worst job you've done?" "What has been your biggest disappointment?" and "If you could edit your past, what would you change?"

John Leguizamo, who played Luigi, also said in his autobiography, "Oh man, that movie sucks. And I suck in it."
I just had to see this movie to find out why it sucked—and boy, did it suck. This movie is so off the mark and borderline confused about whether it was a family film or not. When I finished watching, I felt like the directors and writers had never played the Mario game before making this movie.

The movie has decent effects, considering it was made in the early '90s, but the story and screenplay didn’t add up.

What was with the fungus?

The game made sense with the bad guys being anthropomorphic turtles, but in this movie, they were humanoids of reptilian descent living in another dimension. Mario and Luigi live in the human world.

For the movie plot, I was expecting Mario to have to save Princess Peach, but the movie’s love focus was on Luigi and Princess Daisy. That was my first turn-off.
Daisy was brought to the human world and raised there. Koopa needed to get a rock that was in Daisy’s possession, so he sent his goons to kidnap her and bring her to his dimension—which they did.

Mario and Luigi followed into the new world, where fungus is growing everywhere, and Koopa was king and ruler.
The two heroes have to find Koopa and save Princess Daisy before Koopa gets his hands on the rock in her possession and merges the human world with his.

Critically panned by critics and a box office disaster (making 20millionfroma20millionfroma48 million production cost), it’s rumored that this is the reason no other live-action film has been released from Nintendo’s garage of characters. I hope they get over it—this was in 1993. A lot of great writers could spin characters like Metroid and Zelda into box office hits.

I don’t know why, but I’ll be rewatching this crap.

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