Monday, March 26, 2012

Super Mario Bros.




Runtime: 104 minutes

Directed by: Annabel Jankel, Rocky Morton (along with at least one uncredited person)

Starring: Bob Hoskins, John Legiuzamo, Dennis Hopper, Samantha Mathis

From: Hollywood Pictures

Here's another movie from my childhood, but this time, boy is this a stinking pile. It's not too difficult to find in full online, but it's real easy to find on YouTube and plus, do you really want to spend more than an hour and a half watching it? This was really the first videogame movie that I can think of, and boy does it set a trend for just about all of them being God-awful terrible and a disgrace compared to the great game it was based upon. Here, everyone knows these great games (at least from the original Super Mario Brothers to Super Mario World) and did this movie fail. While making the story realistic would be a challenge for anyone, they failed with what they went with.

The plot as it is... Mario Mario and Luigi Mario (yes, that's their names) are a pair of plumbers in Brooklyn who meet up with archaelogy student Daisy (Mathis); it turns out that her mom escaped from a parallel world and left Daisy at a church. Two bumbling idiot goofs (Richard Edson and Fisher Stevens!) kidnap Daisy and they go into said parallel world to try and get her back from the evil King Koopa (Hopper). It turns out that world is filled with dinosaurs that evolved into humanoids. That's about all you need to know, except that Daisy is needed in order to merge the two worlds together.

The main problem, besides the terrible script and plot, is that the alternate world looks almost exactly like Venusville from Total Recall! You know, the bad part of Mars where the undesireables hang out. It's a rather ugly world which is the opposite of the colorful worlds of those famous games. It makes me realize that the Arnold film is a million times better, that's for sure. And to think that the remake of TR is coming out this year, when it is the videogame film that really deserved a remake. But... Hollywood is pretty stupid. Oh yeah, and the film being all chaotic and so busy (as in, the dinosaur world is full of people and it's always crowded and noisy and it's just tiring to watch) doesn't help either.

You can tell that there were massive production problems; besides all the directors, there were massive screen rewrites and it's so confused; it doesn't know if it wants to be an adult film or a children's flick; it tries to be both and it suceeds at none. And of course, the Englishman Hoskins and his much younger “brother” John L. as a Hispanic trying to play Italian brothers... pretty dumb. LOL at the trivia section of IMDb mentioning how all the stars hated working on the movie and the two leads had to get drunk often just to make it through the whole ordeal. Not to mention the goofs section, with my favorite of how a supposed genius character gives the wrong answer to a math question. Those two bumbling boobs get put into a machine which makes them smarter, and they use big words... ok, not words that are too big, but you get the point; then one of them screws up a math question that was supposed to be right, and that says a whole lot about this movie.

I'll be back Thursday night with a new review.

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