Decisions are made all the
time in Hollywood that seem deliberately geared to baffle the minds
of mere mortals. Decisions like “Ooh,
let’s make three new movies about Darth Vader as a snotty kid”,
or “This Police Academy idea is a goldmine – let’s
make six more” or “Hey, let’s see if Arnold Schwarzenegger
can do comedy!”
But all pale alongside the sheer forehead-smacking lunacy that must have
gripped Tinseltown the day they decided to make a live action movie based
on Nintendo’s flagship videogame franchise. The first movie to
be adapted from gaming source material, it pretty much set the benchmark
for this peculiar and malformed subgenre by being absolutely shit.
Lest we forget, the Super Mario Bros games involve guiding a moustachioed
Italian plumber across a primary coloured two-dimensional landscape,
bashing yellow bricks with his head, collecting giant coins, jumping
on turtles and popping in and out of enormous green pipes. As a videogame,
it’s enormous fun – but it takes a particular kind of madness
to look at that concept and see a real life movie. And it takes a level
of absolute thundering insanity to see Bob Hoskins as the man in the
bright red dungarees, squashing cartoon monsters with his arse.
Together with his brother Luigi (John Leguizamo), Hoskins’ Mario
is a struggling Brooklyn plumber, complete with Bugs Bunny style Noo
Yoik accent. Beaten to every job by the bada-bing mobster Scapelli, they
finally catch a break when Luigi bumps into Daisy (Samantha Mathis),
an archaeology student who has discovered dinosaur bones on the banks
of the Hudson river. She’s also a princess from an alternate dimension
where humans evolved from dinosaurs, a parallel world created when an
asteroid struck the Earth killing off their reptile ancestors.
Daisy
also has a mysterious crystal around her neck, and this is a missing
fragment of the asteroid that has the power to merge the two worlds.
This is something that King Koopa (Dennis Hopper), the sleazy ruler
of the dino-dimension, wants to bring about, so he can get his hands
on
the bountiful resources of our world, and genetically return us all
to monkey form. Oh yeah.
Daisy gets snatched into the parallel world, and the Mario Brothers
follow. What they find is not the brightly coloured cartoon of the
videogame,
but a grim urban sprawl not unlike a Fisher Price Blade Runner playset.
There follows a mind-numbing dash through every mindless Nineties kid-flick
cliché in the book, with characters hurtling from one location
to another for no apparent reason, screaming and shouting every step
of the way. The script, such as it is, basically involves endless variations
on “Let’s go!”, “Look out!” and “WAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!”
Hoskins, an Oscar nominee and BAFTA winner by the time he slipped into
the moustache of Mario, simply makes like a real plumber and gets on
with the job, even when it involves being up to your elbows in crap.
He bounces on mucus trampolines, he attacks Dennis Hopper with a tiny
clockwork bomb and gets to bellow immortal phrases such as “Grab
that Goombah mattress!” as if his life depended on it. At least
he gets off better than poor old Dennis Hopper, who basically gives us
a sneak preview of his villain performance in Speed (released the following
year) while sporting bizarre crests of heavily gelled hair that make
him resemble a karaoke Johnny Rotten.
Need to know: The original choice for the role of Mario was, predictably,
Danny DeVito. It was only when he passed that Hoskins got the call.
Super Mario Bros boasted no less than four directors. Officially, it
was directed
by Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton, who together created the briefly
famous stuttering computer gimp Max Headroom, but two other directors
also helped to shape the unholy mess into something resembling a motion
picture including Roland Joffe, Oscar-nominated for both The Killing
Fields and The Mission.
Princess Daisy’s father, who spends the
whole film as a gooey fungus, is finally returned back to his human
form as Lance Henriksen (see: Giovanni Ribisi, Ally
Sheedy). Henriksen
is
on-screen for all of five seconds, and gets precisely one line: “I’m
back! I love those plumbers!” If you can bear to sit through
the entire movie, and can sit through the credits without slashing
your wrists,
you’ll be treated to a final scene in which two Japanese businessmen
discuss making a videogame based on the adventures of the brothers.
How painfully post-modern.
For an even more blatant Nintendo pimping
movie,
see: Tobey Maguire.
Honourable mention: Hoskins can also be found in the lamentable Spice
World movie, in which erstwhile Ginger Spice Geri Hallilwell disguises
herself as poor old Bob with hilariously lifelike results. In 1996
he also directed and starred in Fatal Caper, an episode of the Tales
from
the Crypt TV series (see: Jada Pinkett-Smith, Brad
Pitt).
Availability: Super Mario Bros is available on DVD.
