“Super Mario Brothers” (1993)
In an interview with The Guardian, the late, great Bob Hoskins answered the questions “What is the worst job you’ve done?”, “What has been your biggest disappointment?” and “If you could edit your past, what would you change?” with the same answer: “Super Mario Brothers.” Not a soul would disagree. The first, and maybe still the worst, major video-game-to-movie adaptation (there’s some very tough competition), it takes the seminal, colorful platform Nintendo games, and like some premonition of how Hollywood would be twenty years on, turns it into a weirdly gritty “Mad Max”-inspired story about Dennis Hopper trying to turn everyone into dinosaurs. Fans of the game would be puzzled by the complete lack of resemblance to the thing they loved, everyone else would just be bored out of their minds at what filmmakers Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel (the creators of “Max Headroom,” and who blew up their own careers with the movie) came up with.
Nadir: Dennis Hopper turning into a T-Rex.
“Jonah Hex” (2010)
The films on this list are terrible, but most are at least recognizably movies: they have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and tell something that at least resembles a coherent story. The same can’t be said of “Jonah Hex,” which runs at a mere 81 minutes, and sucks like a vacuum for every single incoherent one of them. Starring Josh Brolin as DC Comics’ back-from-the-dead, heavily-scarred bounty hunter, who takes on John Malkovich’s auto-villain with the help of Megan Fox’s prostitute, it’s a movie that makes more sense from the trailer than from the actual movie, feeling like the filmmakers (in this case, “Horton Hears A Who” director Jimmy Hayward, who replaced Neveldine and Taylor at the last minute) wrapped the project, only to remember three weeks before released that they hadn’t shot thirty pages of the screenplay, and had to glue something together, because the posters had already gone out. With millions of dollars spent on these movies, a basic degree of competence is the very least you can expect from them. But not from “Jonah Hex.”
Nadir: A final fight sequence that randomly cuts together two fight scenes between the same two people in two different locations, for reasons that no human being on earth can effectively explain. No clip available, but here’s a scene where the film randomly shifts into animation to make up for it.
“Pearl Harbor” (2001)
He’d go on to do it with clones in “The Island,” and with warring alien robots with “Transformers,” so we suppose it’s no surprise that Michael Bay was able bring his unerring talent for making headachey, tedious movies out of potentially exciting premises with “Pearl Harbor.” But the travesty here is that this is history, and one of the most important, tide-shifting, annals-rewriting events of the 20th century at that, and Bay manages to take that dramatic gold and spin it into straw: the final film is a lumpen flavorless bore, featuring three of the least charismatic actors who’ve ever graced a blockbuster in Kate Beckinsale, Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett, in a “love story” so inert we can never really remember who is who. Everything about this film makes us sad, especially the absolute tragedy of its 3-hour running time.
Nadir: So. Many. Flags. So. Much. Slo-mo.
Reading old-timey reviews of this Mattel masterpiece is a real blast from a pre-“Transformers,” pre-“Lego Movie,” pre-“Battleship” past—almost all of them include a “well, what can you expect from a movie based on a toy?”-type comment. What a funny world people lived in in the late 80s when it wasn’t obvious that small pieces of moulded plastic could be ported over to billion-dollar movie franchises! But it must be said, as bad as many subsequent toy films have been, ‘Masters’ is hard to beat. Based on the He-Man universe largely created because Mattel passed up the opportunity to make “Star Wars” figures (oh, someone got so fired) and needed to create a rival franchise, the film “boasts” Dolph Lundgren as a perfectly cast He-Man, Frank Langella as Skeletor and Some Lady as Evil-lyn who is, grab onto your garters, a baddie. Despite some pretty decent sets, the film is a scarcely watchable hotchpotch of bits that you think you’ve seen in other movies, done better, and the based-on-a-toy thing really does make itself felt—the mythology is wafer-thin, and the plot is super-basic: big muscly guy looks for MacGuffin. Still, wasn’t Courteney Cox young here?
Nadir: Lundgren being comprehensively outacted by the dwarf encased in latex playing the irritating Gwildor.
