Product: Super Mario Bros. [VHS] (1993)
Rating: 1.0
Give me a break.
I'm not going to lie to you: Super Mario Bros. is a VERY bad movie. Then again, I'm not going to display my arcane knowledge of geekdom by throwing a bunch of dissimilarities between the movie and the games at you or go into a long spiel about what a waste of a film reel this box office bomb was, either. It can generally be agreed upon by the majority of tasteful movie-going audiences that this isn't worth viewing even from a distance of several thousand feet. The Mario Bros. should be left to the likes of Nintendo and Captain Lou Albano. Why is that? Judge for yourself.The movie follows Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo (as Mario and Luigi, respectively) as the latter chases the girl of his dreams into an alternate dimension only to find that she is the princess of this parallel world in which man evolved from dinosaurs instead of apes. Don't leave yet, it gets better.I said I wouldn't point out the discrepancies, and I won't, but as a fan of the old-school games, the lack of even a vestige of what makes the games classics brings this movie down. I doubt if anyone has the creative chutzpah to turn the NES platform games into an effective movie; certainly Buena Vista did not. Names of heroes and enemies alike are stolen and manhandled by the worst form of creative license. Establishments are named after locales in the games with only the names - and none of the spirit - intact. Sure, they play the music from the first Super Mario Bros. at the beginning as the story is explained, but does that mean the creators know any of the material they're working with? Not at all. Dennis Hopper, Bob Hoskins, Samantha Mathis, and Fisher Stevens are all fools for taking serious dramatic roles in this bomb - only John Leguizamo seems to have made a full recovery from this temporary (for him) setback.The point is that it is based on a video game, and it is not so wrong to expect something that at least resembles the game in some aspects. As it is, SMB turns the whimsy and creative flights of fancy of the video games and compresses them into a macabre vision of a dystopian parallel universe that has no place in the confines of the revolutionary platformers' legacy. Not worth watching in the slightest, even if you have been under a rock since 1985 and have no clue what Super Mario Bros. is at its core.