Released: May 1993
Directors: Annabel Jenkel and Rocky Morton
Run Time: 104 Minutes
Rated PG
Distributor: Hollywood Pictures
Genre: Action/Science Fiction
Cast:
Bob Hoskins: Mario
John Leguizamo: Luigi
Dennis Hopper: King Koopa
Samantha Mathis: Daisy
Fisher Stevens: Iggy
Richard Edson: Spike
In the grand pantheon of entertainment, we have films of such renown and scale like Ben-Hur, Spartacus, and Lawrence of Arabia. These grand epics have shaped the industry for decades and have risen the bar for what constitutes an epic film. Many films have tried to replicate this classics, but few have succeeded. All these films have laid the foundation for what could be the greatest film of all time…..Super Mario Bros.….wait, what? No, no, no, that can’t be right. Are we talking about the same movie here? Super Mario Bros.? From 1993? The one starring Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo and Dennis Hopper? Oh, dear. When it comes to movies based on video games, you usually don’t get more notorious than Uwe Boll as a director, as his “films” like Alone in the Dark and House of the Dead seem to indicate. However, they were NOT the first movies of their kind. There were movies ABOUT video games before 1993 like Tron and War Games, but there had never been a movie that was actually based on a video game until Super Mario Bros. Here we go.
65 million years ago, a meteorite struck the earth that wiped out all the dinosaurs. Apparently it also split the world into two different parallel dimensions. One dimension saw humans evolve from monkeys and the other one saw them evolve from dinosaurs. Fast-forward 65 million years and we end up in Brooklyn with two brothers, Mario and Luigi. These two plumbers end up running into Daisy, who runs a dig-site near the Brooklyn Bridge. They soon discover that Daisy is being hunted by King Koopa from the other dimension because she has a piece of the original meteorite that when brought together will merge both dimensions allowing Koopa to rule both worlds and eliminate the mammals from OUR world. Everybody get that? No? You’re not the only ones. The story presented here is so bonkers that you would think that you were on drugs. I think somebody was, because there’s an awful lot of fungus in this movie. The original game didn’t have much of a plot: Mario and Luigi have to rescue a princess from a giant turtle dragon. That’s all you needed to know from the game. That element of game did make into the movie, but that’s really about the only thing the movie really gets right.
I can’t really say that there’s anything wrong with the cast here. Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo are pretty good as Mario and Luigi and Dennis Hopper always makes a great villain. This is where things really start coming apart, however. It’s not that the acting is awful, I mean it can be, but the problem is that the actors had to deal with a script that was changing daily. It got to the point where Dennis Hopper refused to memorize his lines, because they kept changing. Hoskins and Leguizamo were told that they were going to be making a certain kind of film, but when they showed up on set, it was very different from what they were told. Very few things in the film match up with the game. Mario and Luigi don’t even get their iconic costumes until about half-way through the film. The character of Daisy isn’t even from the original game. No, she’s from the GameBoy title, Super Mario Land. It is incredibly obvious that there were major issues behind the scenes that kept the film from having a coherent tone and look. Normally, I would accuse studio interference with these kinds of absurdities, but the real blame lies with the directors. They insisted on making the film their own way instead of doing what Nintendo wanted. Instead of a bright and colorful film, we get a dark, gritty, dystopian-style of a film that just doesn’t work.
I’ll be honest: There is stuff in this film to like. I actually kind of like the look of the film, despite the fact that it doesn’t work most of the time. The set designs and some of the creature designs are not terrible. Some of the visual effects are pretty interesting, but the clashing tones of the film really work against it. It wants to be this goofy sci-fi comedy, but at the same time, it wants to be a dark and gritty action film. The Super Mario Bros. film is far removed from the game that you could barely recognize it. My brother and I grew up with the original game, so when the film came out, I was confused, as were a lot of people. This didn’t feel like Super Mario. This felt like a cheap Blade Runner knock-off. They also dragged poor Lance Henriksen into this film with a ridiculous cameo. From what’s been released about the film’s production, there was some serious shit going down. Both Hoskins and Leguizamo were so uncomfortable with their roles that they resorted to alcohol to deal with it, and you can tell in certain scenes that Leguizamo was hammered. Dennis Hopper got into a 3 hour shouting match with the directors about their complete lack of professionalism. Apparently, there was a point where the directors’ agent told them to get off the set.
All production problems aside, Super Mario Bros. had the misfortune of being released in May of 1993, a few weeks before a small indie film called Jurassic Park hit the scene. Super Mario cost about 48 million to make, but it didn’t even make back half of that. For a movie that kicked off the video game movie craze, it fell flat on its face. It was so bad that Nintendo refused to do another movie based on a video game. This was 27 years ago. Obviously, Super Mario’s failure didn’t stop other studios from giving it a shot. The following year, we got Street Fighter with Jean-Claude Van Damme and Raul Julia. Another failure. It was 1995’s live-action adaptation of Mortal Kombat that proved you CAN do a video game-based movie properly and be successful. For about a decade, Super Mario Bros. was considered to be the lowest point for video game-based movies. That would change when film “auteur” Uwe Boll entered the scene with House of the Dead. Suddenly, it seemed like Super Mario was Citizen Kane in comparison. For the most part, movies based on video games have been met with failure or mixed success. There have been a few recent releases, though, that seem to show film-makers taking the source material seriously. Movies like the latest Tomb Raider and Sonic The Hedgehog are good examples of movies of this sort. What’s really funny is that despite the issues, I find Super Mario Bros. to be a fairly entertaining film. Good? Not remotely, but I don’t think it’s the abomination that a lot of people said it was. It might not seem that way, considering what I just said about it, but I actually had a bit of fun, considering I hadn’t seen the film in over 20 years. Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo, and Dennis Hopper are all fun to watch, with some fairly creative visuals, but this is not required that you seek this movie out.
My Final Recommendation: Oh, Super Mario Bros., what did they do to you? 6/10