Super Mario Bros. is perhaps the greatest and most influential video game series ever made. Mario and Luigi helped raise millions of confused youngsters, like me, through the 80s and 90s. It stands to reason, then, that it wouldn't be too difficult to turn that great material into a great movie, right? WRONG! 4 directors, 3 writers, countless recasting and rewriting -- and this is what they came up with? The finished result, Super Mario Bros. released in 1993, looks nothing like the J-Pop fairy tale from the video game; more like some kind of strange cross between Land of the Lost and Solarbabies, starring two extras from a Spike Lee movie. It's as if the many directors and writers took random words from the game and mixed them with concept art for Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. And the amount of info they completely changed or omitted is staggering.
Super Mario Bros. could have been such a kick ass flick! Instead, it set the standard for every shitty video game adaptation to follow (Super Mario Bros. is the first movie based directly on a video game). Bob Hoskins, who played Mario, calls it the worst movie he ever worked on - and he has 99 credits as an actor on IMDb. If you are a fan of the game, and you've seen the movie, you know how frustrating it is to watch. At a certain point you'll be looking at Dennis Hopper shooting lasers over the heads of giant lizard men trying to capture John Leguizamo and you won't be able to help but grab the DVD cover to make sure the movie is, in fact, named Super Mario Bros. The name is all it shares with the game. All of this might have been somewhat forgivable if only the plot they chose to go with had something to keep you hooked. But alas, they make sure you've lost all will to live within the first 5 minutes of the outset. And it only goes down the pipes from there.
