1993’s Super Mario Bros. is so much better than the new animated movie
The Super Mario Bros.Movie is a pitch straight down the middle of the plate. It’s uncomplicated, breezy, and risk-free. It’s the exact kind of Mario origin story that you’d expect to see after the disastrous critical reception to the 1993 live-action movie Super MarioBros. — and for all of those reasons, it’s pretty boring.
It has nothing on the grandiosity of 1993’s Super Mario Bros., a movie that infuriated its stars and cinema audiences with its bizarre creative decisions. Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo, who played Mario and Luigi respectively in the film, drank whiskey between takes to cope with the production’s chaotic set, which may have led to Hoskins’ repeated injuries while filming. In 2007, Hoskins told The Guardian that Super Mario Bros. was “the worst thing I ever did… It was a fuckin’ nightmare. The whole experience was a nightmare. It had a husband-and-wife team directing, whose arrogance had been mistaken for talent. After so many weeks their own agent told them to get off the set! Fuckin’ nightmare. Fuckin’ idiots.”
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It’s obviously for the best that the Super Mario Bros. setenvironment wasn’t replicated in the making of the 2023 animated film. (At least as far as we know.) But the overcorrection in the other direction led to a film that lacks any sense of spontaneity, creativity, or narrative risk. The Super Mario Bros. Movie is so by-the-books that you could easily predict the entire plot just from the trailers alone. If anything, the plot you’d predict would probably have more twists and turns than the actual movie.
But Maddy, you might be thinking, isn’t The Super Mario Bros. Moviefor kids? It doesn’t need to be complicated. Sure, I take your point. One of the big criticisms of the 1993 Mario
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