Mustache Marathon 2: Super Mario Brothers (1993)



I go into too many movies thinking “I’ve heard this is bad.  How bad can it really be?”  This is because I spend so much time looking at my computer screen and reading other people’s opinions on the internet.  Every movie is either the best thing ever or the worst thing ever.  There isn’t a lot of middle ground.  Super Mario Brothers falls into the worst thing ever section.

All I’ve ever heard about Super Mario Brothers was how atrocious it was.   I’m not sure what people expected out of the movie when they watched it.  The movie is based on a video game about two plumber brothers who jump on the heads of little mushroom monster things, knock the shells of bipedal turtles, and go down giant green tubes to collect gold coins that are bigger than they are.  All of this to save a princess.  That wouldn’t translate into a movie very well, would it?  And it doesn’t.

Here’s the plot of the movie, and it’s a far cry from the game.  Mario Mario is a plumber and Luigi Mario is his apprentice.  They are from Brooklyn.  Luigi meets a girl names Daisy.  She gets abducted and taken to an alternate universe where humans evolved from dinosaurs instead of apes.  The king there, King Koopa, wants a piece of a meteor that Daisy had so that he can bring both universes together as one.  Mario and Luigi go to save Daisy.  There are other great things to be had in Super Mario Brothers, but that covers the majority of the plot.

If there’s one thing that this movie did right, it’s in the casting.  I’m not going to lie and say that everyone is perfect for their parts.  What I will say, however, is that they were all invested in their parts.  I wouldn’t call any performance a bad performance.  They were all bringing their top notch acting to their roles.  Dennis Hopper, Bob Hoskins, and John Leguizamo were all solid in their respective roles.  They brought something that not many other actors would have brought to those roles.  They helped to make the movie enjoyable.

There isn’t too much else I can say about Super Mario Brothers without getting into revealing spoilers.  Super Mario Brothers might look like a bad movie, and it might smell like a bad movie, but, for me, it felt good.  I enjoyed the hell out of the movie.  The acting, the script that is bonkers, the sets which I didn’t get into but look like the dirtiest futuristic set you could imagine called Dinohattan, and the effects which are surprisingly decent elevate this movie above what it could have been.  Is it a great adaptation of the video game series?  There is no way that I could say that it is.  But it was a hell of a lot of fun and I’m glad I took time to sit down and watch it.

The next movie up in the Mustache Marathon is a movie called Bronson from 2008 or 2009.  I can’t remember right now.  It stars Tom Hardy.  I’ve heard that it’s the best Tom Hardy performance ever, and I’ve been told that I should watch it.  That’s why it’s in this marathon.  And that’s all I have to say about that.

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