Director: Rocky Morton, Annabel Jankel
Cast: Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo, Dennis Hopper, Samantha Mathis
Have I Seen It Before: I’m not 100% sure, but I think I may have seen it twice in the theater. I may be the only person living, or to have lived (including the cast and filmmakers, one would imagine) to have seen it in the theater twice. It was somehow on my—I was all of eight—radar to insist we go see the movie, despite the commercials screaming—even to an eight-year-old—that there was something not quite right about the film. Then, when a friend’s mom decided to try and stem the tide of summer exhaustion with a trip to the theater, I went again, because even then I’d rather be at the movies than almost anywhere else. That’s still true.
Then I remember becoming absolutely fixated on renting the movie and seeing it again when it was released on video later that year. I can’t remember why I might have done this, because I wasn’t all that thrilled with the movie even back then. It may have been a direct result of someone in the school cafeteria insisting that Disney/Hollywood Pictures (or, the monolithic “they” as we would have called it then) was absolutely, without a doubt going to make a sequel, because the people that make movies don’t include the <Back to the Future (1985)> ending.
As it turns out, I’ve probably seen this film too many times.
Did I Like It: Making a good movie is a mysterious alchemy. It’s a massive undertaking, where the majority of the intricate pieces involved have to be either simultaneously or in precise coordination at the top of their game, and if the marketing isn’t right, no one may see the damned thing. The one thing that I think probably has to happen is that the people involved have to want to be there*. Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo don’t want to be there, but to dip one’s toe in the trivia associated with the train wreck production knows that they were sufficiently lubricated to work through their displeasure. They emerge from the film as genial presences, and we can commiserate with their plight in being in the movie while we are forcing ourselves to watch it. And yet, one can’t help but marvel at the alternate universe—where’s a massive meteor when you need one?—where Tom Hanks nearly played Mario, but was passed on as he wasn’t at that time the kind of box office draw that they could get out of Hoskins.
Dennis Hopper, on the other hand, just spends the film looking angrily confused, screaming “plumbers,” “fungus,” and “meteor” in alternating combinations.
Maybe Hoskins and Leguizamo should have offered him a drink. If everyone had been sloshed, we all might have gotten into the cheap (emphasis on cheap) riff on <Blade Runner (1982)> or <Total Recall (1990)>. Instead, things seem as off as they did when I was eight.
Then again, my usual standard for a good adaptation of a pre-existing property is that it makes me want to take in the original source material. I’m fairly sure that each and every time I’ve seen the movie, I’ve wanted to play one of the Mario games, if only to wash the taste out of my mouth**.
*Sure, a movie like Casino Royale (1967) is filled with overpaid, overly relaxed people, and is perhaps the dictionary definition of a train wreck and by all accounts Bill Murray would have preferred to be eaten alive by wildebeests than continue shooting <Groundhog Day (1993)>, but these exceptions would have to be unusual bordering on unique.
**In the movies defense, we were sufficiently inoculated from having to force ourselves to try and play a terrible SNES game adapted from the movie.