Super Mario Bros. (1993)

I own this movie on DVD (and had a TV ripped VHS copy as a kid)

So I have a heavy nostalgic bias for this movie... when I was a kid, my Aunt recorded this off TV with her VCR and gave me the tape. So I had that as my way of watching it. Complete with all the commercial breaks on the tape that I'd fast forward. She also missed recording the first few minutes of the film so I actually didn't see the opening for many years.
I now own it on DVD and watched it again, even showing it to my son.
It has a lot of charm, I have to admit. Yet it isn't without it's problems. If that isn't an understatement.

So there's two different ways to look at this film, and it will greatly effect how you rate it in each way.
If you take this just as a Mario Bros adaptation to film. It's really bad. Murders the lore and game and characters in crazy ways and largely doesn't make sense.
However... if you ignore the fact that it's supposed to be a Mario movie, you can look at it as this cheesy, over the top, cyber punk 90s action comedy that's really goofy. In that regards, it's actually pretty good! Then again, that may just be my nostalgia goggles talking.
When I watch this, I disregard the fact it's mean to be Mario and just take it as what I said, a cheesy cyber punk 90s comedy. And I can't help but love it. Not 5 star love it as it still has issues and is still bad as a Mario movie, but if you grew up with this film like I did, it's a solid 4 out of 5 stars.

Mistake Status: I have some already, I don't remember when I did those... but I will for sure do a deep dive into this movie at some point in the future.

Quantom X ★

Of all the movies that have attempted to adapt a video game and failed, Super Mario Bros has got to be the biggest failure of them all. The more and more I watched of this movie, the more I felt my childhood being destroyed.

This movie fails on every single frontier an adaptation could possibly fail on. Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo are completely miscast (apparently they were drunk while filming), the bright and colourful world of the games are replaced with a dark, ugly Blade Runner style city, I resented virtually every single character, the direction is flat and devoid of a shred of creativity, it has one of the worst scripts of all time, I cringed at every single attempt this movie made to create mythology in its world and the attempts at trying to reference the games (cough Yoshi, cough Toad) almost broke me. No joke!

Avoid this movie at all costs! It is not worth the time.

Casual Person