Super Mario Bros. |
  • UK / USA / Japan • 1993 • 104m •    • Directed by: Annabel Jankel, Rocky Morton. • Starring: Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo, Dennis Hopper, Samantha Mathis, Fisher Stevens, Richard Edson, Fiona Shaw, Dana Kaminski, Mojo Nixon, Gianni Russo, Francesca P. Roberts, Lance Henriksen, Sylvia Harman. • Music by: Alan Silvestri.      Mario and Luigi, two wacky plumbers, undertake a daring quest to save a princess in "Dinohattan" -- a hidden world where the inhabitants evolved from dinosaurs! Mario and Luigi face deadly challenges from a diabolical lizard king and must battle giant reptilian goombas, outwit misfit thugs and undermine a sinister scheme to take over the world!
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Review:
Unfortunately, the movie turned out to be a major box office disaster and was trashed in almost every newspaper. As a matter of fact, it started the whole "videogames don't make good movies" craze. I hope that this argument can be proved wrong, but SUPER MARIO BROS. probably will not be a likely candidate to challenge this accusation.
This movie gets so many things wrong it's almost a miracle that I can write anything nice about it. With the exception of the characters' names and a few throwaway references, SUPER MARIO BROS., the movie has absolutely nothing in common with the video game series it's based on. The production completely eschews the lighthearted, colorful atmosphere of the Mushroom Kingdom and instead slaps on a dark, fungus-covered metropolis inhabited by dinosaurs evolved (yes, I said EVOLVED) into human beings. (One figures the scriptwriters mixed up SUPER MARIO WORLD--the only game in the series to set in a dinosaur-populated environment--as the ideal atmosphere for the MARIO franchise in general.) Instead of power-up mushrooms, fireflowers, and goombas, we get a human cast of villains acting (and looking) bizarre (even the chief villain, King Koopa is disturbingly portrayed as a human), raptors, exploding flameguns, and some totally ridiculous concept called "de-evolution." The nasty goombas are transformed from puny mushroom baddies into hulking lizards, and Yoshi, the beloved dinosaur sidekick of Mario, becomes a cuddly but woefully fake-looking baby T-Rex (and get this--he's Koopa's pet!). The whole atmosphere of this "Dinohatten" is too weird, chaotic, and cold to be engaging.
This may sound bad enough, but the movie's biggest mistake is its failure to provide anything in the way of a coherent (or compelling) narrative. The plot is a jumbled mishmash about meteorites, alternate universes, and fungus that spends too much time indulging in its own stupidity rather than offering some intelligence. The movie's action sequences should provide spark and energy, but here they come across as strangely pointless and uninvolving. Despite the clamor occurring in the scenes, the viewer feels a strange sense of detachment to the whole thing. This makes the movie as a whole a major chore to sit through, as if there aren't any duller moments to bore viewers to death (such as a slow, inactive sequence where Mario and Luigi escape from a goomba-infested elevator). Matters are not helped by the ridiculously cheesy special effects, which are so fake that they come across as laughable.
Even the aural aspects of the movie are displeasing; the soundtrack starts out promisingly with an electronic-sounding ditty of the classic MARIO BROS. theme, but aside from that, we got a fully-orchestral score (from Alan Silvestri) which is distressingly un-MARIO like. The same is true for the throwaway rock-and-roll songs, which were obviously slapped on for commercial reasons. The overabundance of screaming and overloud sound mixing is tempting enough to make one turn the volume down.
Yet as problematic as the final result is, I do have something of a strange attraction to SUPER MARIO BROS. the movie. I admit to being crazy about the film when I was younger, even when all the critics were tearing it to pieces, and to this day I still wonder why I enjoy watching it every now and then. Perhaps because it's such a sorely misguided, warped, unimaginative mess that it ends up being a flick that can be fun to laugh at.
To its benefit, however, SUPER MARIO BROS. does support a high-quality cast--which is quite surprising given that this is hardly the kind of movie that demands one. Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo work chemistry as the brothers, even if they are nothing like their video game counterparts, and Samantha Mathis holds her own ground as the pretty Princess Daisy. Dennis Hopper's portrayal of King Koopa, on the other hand, is disappointingly uncharismatic and spends more time chewing the scenery than creating a character worth rooting against; Fiona Shaw is more effective as his dastardly secretary. All seem to take on their jobs with a good-natured attitude and do what they can with the mumbo-jumbo material.
But even that isn't enough to qualify a good recommendation for SUPER MARIO BROS. as a movie. It's too unfaithful a recreation for MARIO fans, too noisy even for action-buffs, and too preposterous to reach a smart audience. If there's anything that I can say about this movie, it could be that it is a "guilty-pleasure" time killer that evokes plenty of laughs. So if you want to sit through a convoluted, incomprehensible action-flick that blatantly disregards its source material, then this is the movie for you. Otherwise, SUPER MARIO BROS. is not an example of great film-making, much less adapting a video game into a movie.
Review by JTurner82 from the Internet Movie Database.
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