Retro Movie Review: Super Mario Bros (1993)

Super Mario Bros was directed by Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, and it stars Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo, and Dennis Hopper.

Where do I even begin with this movie? What is there to say that’s never been said before?

I suppose I could begin with this quote from Bob Hoskins himself:

“It was a f*ckin’ nightmare. The whole experience was a nightmare.”

It was also in that same interview he was asked the following questions; the worst job you ever did, your biggest regret, and what would you change about your past. He answered Super Mario Bros to all three questions. It’s clear that there was so much wrong about this movie both on screen and off.

 

Hoskins also had the following to say about the husband and wife directing duo of Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel:

“It had a husband-and-wife team directing, whose arrogance had been mistaken for talent. After so many weeks their own agent told them to get off the set! F*ckin’ nightmare. F*ckin’ idiots.”

It’s clear that Hoskins has a sour opinion about both the directors and the film itself.

 

There is so much that needs to be said about these guys which I’ll get on to in a bit, but it’s clear Hoskins has such a sour opinion on the two of them. It’s also worth noting that Bob Hoskins had no idea that Super Mario was based off a video game until his son smartened him up on it.

Hoskins isn’t the only one who has negative feelings towards this movie. Dennis Hopper was also of the same opinion as Hoskins:

“It was a nightmare, very honestly, that movie. It was a husband and wife directing team who were both control freaks and wouldn’t talk before they made decisions. Anyway, I was supposed to go down there for five weeks, and I was there for 17. It was so over budget.”

He also shared this light-hearted story about explaining his reasons for doing this movie to his son:

“I made a picture called Super Mario Bros., and my six-year-old son at the time – he’s now 18 – he said, ‘Dad, I think you’re probably a pretty good actor, but why did you play that terrible guy King Koopa in Super Mario Bros.?’ and I said, ‘Well Henry, I did that so you could have shoes,’ and he said, ‘Dad, I don’t need shoes that badly.'”

John Leguizamo said in his autobiography that it was such a negative experience. He and Bob Hoskins knew the movie would turn out bad so they would frequently get drunk just to make it through the experience. John also tells this funny story about how Bob broke his finger when a van’s door slammed on his hand. When it happened, Hoskins started swearing profusely and incoherently, which Leguizamo described as ‘Cockney Tourette’s’. Hoskins would have to wear a pink cast for the rest of the filming.

I remember this being a big deal for its time. I still remember the first time I saw the trailer and it blew my mind. It wasn’t one of those things that passed you by and was swept up underneath the carpet. It had lots of promotion and a huge range of merchandise. I remember getting action figures of Mario, Luigi, Koopa and a Koompa for Christmas.

It’s also worth mentioning that this was the first time a video game movie had ever been adapted into a movie, so it was in some respects historic.

The last time I watched this in its entirety was when it was first released in cinemas back in 1993. I’ve seen clips of it over the years but never the whole movie.

The movie came out, it flopped, faded away, and has since been resurrected as a cult favourite.

What is it about this movie that went so horribly wrong? Well, this is the plot in a nutshell.

 

THE CAST OF CHARACTERS

Mario and Luigi are played by Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo. I’m fine with the casting choices here. Both Hoskins and Leguizamo had great chemistry here, I guess all those times getting drunk paid off, huh?

It’s interesting seeing who else were considered to play the Mario Brothers. Danny DeVito, Bruno Kirby, Dustin Hoffman, Bill Murray, and Cheech Marin were all under consideration to play the role of Mario. Tom Hanks was considered for the role of Luigi, but the studio felt he was no longer a box office draw after a string of failures. He would go on to win the Academy Award for best actor in his role in Philadelphia.

The games give hints that the Mario Brothers are plumbers, the movie goes overboard with it. They make it obviously clear that these guys are plumbers. If there’s one thing the movie follows from the games, it’s the thing the games play up the least.

It also explains why they’re called the Mario Brothers because both they’re last names are Mario (Mario Mario & Luigi Mario). You know, I never thought about that. Why are they called the Mario Brothers? It’s like me and my brother Adam calling ourselves the Adam Brothers instead of by our surname. It doesn’t make any sense, but did we need the movie to make sense of it?

Luigi has a love interest named Daisy (Samantha Mathis), and she’s later revealed to be Princess Daisy. She’s introduced as someone whose digging for Dinosaur bones underneath the Brooklyn Bridge. Why does Luigi have a love interest and not Mario? And why did they go with Princess Daisy and not Princess Peach, the more famous princess in Mario universe. She even wears a pink dress at one point just like Princess Peach! Unlike with Hoskins, Leguizamo and Mathis have no chemistry and their relationship moves way too fast. They become lovers in, like, the first 15 minutes into the movie.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Keaton and Kevin Costner all turned down the role of King Koopa, which ended up going to Dennis Hopper. Hopper plays the role over the top, not like his character in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, but he understands where this movie is going and plays along with it. I was always confused as to why they called him King Koopa and not King Bowser. The thing that the most offsetting is the look. Bowser is supposed to be this fire spitting turtle dragon hybrid, so why is he a human? He may be human in appearance but is actually a dinosaur. I talk about that in more detail later.

Koopa has two henchmen, Iggy and Spike (Fisher Stevens and Richard Edson) who are also decedent from dinosaurs. They’re both idiots who provide the comic relief, sort of like the burglars from Home Alone. They make for a decent comedy duo, I guess.

Now I’ve talked about the main characters, I think it’s time to talk about the backstory.

 

THE PLOT

The movie opens up with the classic Super Mario Bros theme. It’s not a cinematic rendition version, just the same old 8-bit version from the games. That will be the only real reference to the game in the entire movie.

This is followed up by an animated history lesson narrated by Dan Castellaneta (Homer Simpson) explaining how a meteoroid crashed into earth, killing the dinosaurs, which splits the universe into two. The surviving Dinosaurs cross over to this new dimension and evolve into a humanoid race, whiles the other dimension is the one we live in.

Koopa (Dennis Hopper), who belongs to the Dinosaur dimension, want to cross over and merge the two dimensions together so he can take over, but in order for him to do that he needs a piece of the original meteor that caused the split. Princess Daisy has been keeping it safe so Koopa captures the Princess which leads to the Mario Brothers to go and rescue her.

 

RANDOM THOUGHTS

How does this movie hold up after 26 years? Pretty much the same, I guess.

The biggest complaint I always hear is that this movie doesn’t resemble anything to do with the games, other than the name Super Mario Bros. I agree. There are early drafts of the scripts that are in tune with the games, there’s even concept art which again resembles the game, but they chose to go with a more adult-oriented themed. Why? I do not know.

Nintendo had no creative involvement at all. Selling the movie rights for a mere $2million to a small production company known as Light Motive. That was a mistake. Imagine if Nintendo produced the movie themselves. I wonder how different things would have been. In the 26 years since Super Mario Bros, Nintendo have never tried to make another movie. They even cancelled a Metriod movie because the experience had scarred them that much. The movie even hints at a sequel which never happened. The sequel was rumoured to have had Donkey Kong as the main villain.

Shigeru Miyamoto, Mario’s creator had this to say:

“In the end, it was a very fun project that they put a lot of effort into,” but also said, “The one thing that I still have some regrets about is that the movie may have tried to get a little too close to what the Mario Bros. video games were. And in that sense, it became a movie that was about a video game, rather than being an entertaining movie in and of itself.”

 

I need to talk about Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel because they were universally hated by everyone on set. The producers, actors, everybody.

One story that sticks out involved Rocky Morton pouring a cup of hot coffee on an extra. According to John Leguizamo, Morton was looking at the extras on set and was not happy with what he saw. He thought the costumes looked too pristine. He grabbed a cup of coffee and poured it all over one of the extras. The actor was wearing a rubber mask that wasn’t sealed at the neck, so the hot coffee flowed down the suit and burned him. The actor screamed in pain, and Morton said, “Oh well, he’s just an extra”. Morton has always denied the allegations.

There were constant re-writes of the scripts almost every day. Dennis Hopper and Bob Hoskins didn’t bother reading the revised scripts because they knew it would be changed again. Hoskins said to Leguizamo:

“Not all English people are like them. He’s a cunt, and she’s a cow”

It has been said that the story behind the camera is more interesting than the movie itself. That’s certainly the case for the Super Mario Bros Movie. They need to make a movie about the making of this movie, much like what they did for Disaster Movie.

 

I do want to praise the CGI. The scenes involving the Devolution Chamber/ guns were cutting edge for the time and I still think it holds up to this day. The animatronics are also very impressive and deserve to be praised. Although Yoshi just looks like a dull, generic dinosaur. Back in the 90s, everything was about Dinosaurs, much like how nowadays it’s Zombies or Aliens. They were everywhere and Super Mario Bros was released at the very height of Dino-Mania. A few weeks later, Jurassic Park was released and everybody quickly forgot about Super Mario Bros.

Dinohattan looks impressive. It’s this dark, futuristic world reminiscent to Blade Runner. It eventually occurred to me that the sets were designed by David L. Snyder, who also worked on Blade Runner. Hence the similarities.

Do yourselves a favour and Google search what the Goombas looked like. Just look at those expressions, they crack me up.

There are other references to the games littered throughout the movies. Big Bertha, the giant fish from Super Mario Bros 3, is a bouncer at the bar. Thwomps are now these rocket boots that are powered up by things that look like Bullet Bills. The Ba-Bombs are the only things that do what they’re supposed to do, even though they’re wearing Rebooks. Got to get that product placement in, guys.

 

When I really think about it, I think this was misguided. What was it about it that made it misguided? Was the source material too complicated to be translated into a movie? It was done fairly well in the animated series, so you could say it just didn’t translate well into live action.

It’s a terrible adaptation but if you can distance yourself from it being a Super Mario Bros movie, you can get some enjoyment out of it. It is watchable, it’s not a total bore. It’s far from great, but it’s not as terrible as its reputation. As I said, it’s misguided.

Maybe it shouldn’t have been called Super Mario Bros. Then again if it wasn’t called Super Mario Bros, would we still be talking about it to this day? If anything the name preserves it. A product of its time you could say.

See it for yourself. See it for what it is, and always trust the fungus!

Rating: ** (No way, Pedro)