By Geno McGahee
Let me begin by saying that I am not a gamer. I did have the original Nintendo 8 bit system and am familiar with the two plumbers and all that, but it’s not sacred ground for me. So, I went into watching this film with open eyes and taking the film for what it is. I’ve heard so many bad things about it, I decided that the time was finally right to watch it through myself and see if it’s terrible as advertised or if it’s just not close enough to the source material.
I must say that the casting in this is sort of strange. Bob Hoskins is Mario and John Leguizamo is Luigi. There was no chemistry between the two actors. The pair just doesn’t work. Leguizamo seems to be doing his best with the material while Hoskins seems to be in this one for a paycheck.
An actor that is not in this for a paycheck is the great Dennis Hopper, playing the role of King Koopa. Hopper is over the top in the role and seems to be really enjoying the character. He’s an evil politician/ruler that laughs with regularity and gets angry with regularity. The visuals of him walking with the dinosaur goons down the halls like he owns the place is really amusing. Make no mistake, Hopper is the reason to watch this film. He made the most of it.
The Mario bros. live a normal life, plumbing in the Bronx, when they meet Daisy (Samantha Mathis), an archeologist, and Luigi immediately falls for her. She has a stone from her childhood around her neck that has the ability to transfer her from their world to the world ran by Koopa. Unfortunately, the world ran by King Koopa isn’t that different from the one that they just came from. I can see why the gamers and fans of the series were not happy with this. They made no efforts to make this feel like a Super Mario Bros. movie. I’m actually not sure what the fuck I’m watching here.
King Koopa’s two idiots, which reminded me a lot of Bulk and Skull from the MIGHTY MORPHIN POWER RANGERS, kidnap Daisy and bring her to the other side and the Mario Bros. follow to save her, but this movie really spins its wheels. Despite the action sequences, the film just drags and I found myself really uninterested in the journey of the Mario Bros.
Throughout the film, there’s this fungus everywhere that is the remnants of the former king that was de-evolved by Koopa. It helps the Mario bros., but it’s just really trying to add things from the game to make it look like it’s tied to the source material. It grows mushrooms and releases ba-bombs, but if I didn’t know this was a Mario bros. movie and they didn’t refer to themselves as “Mario Bros.” every five minutes, I would not tie it to the game.
The Mario Bros. fight King Koopa at the end and they escape back to their world in the Bronx as Daisy remains behind and I was really happy that this one was over. It ran 1 hour and 44 minutes, but man, it felt much longer. This films multiple problems sank it quick and there wasn’t enough of Hopper to make this a winner.
SUPER MARIO BROS. is terrible. This is the opposite of fan service. I would not be surprised if this is a screenplay that was re-worked to be a Mario Bros. movie. I begin to think that maybe they didn’t have the budget to make it work, but they had 48 million and I think they could have done much better than this.
They had three writers for this one and one of them was Ed Solomon who wrote BILL & TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE and MEN IN BLACK, but I’m not sure how much he was involved in this. He may have been the fixer guy they hired to try to make sense of this terrible screenplay, but he couldn’t save it either.
In case you cannot tell, I do not recommend SUPER MARIO BROS. The year was a good year for movies too like THE FUGITIVE and MRS. DOUBTFIRE. So there was no excuse for this shit, but I have to give it points for Hopper.
