The Super Mario Bros. Movie is now on Netflix, and so it seemed this would be a great time to finally check it out, after having not been thrilled with the initial trailers Nintendo showed off earlier this year. It turns out, my concerns were justified. (Heavy spoilers ahead.)

Illumination did a great job with the look of the film. It’s well-animated. The Mushroom Kingdom is colorful and beautiful. The character models all look fantastic. There’s lots of fan-service from the games. I especially liked the Kid Icarus plug and seeing Mario playing his own NES in his bedroom. Also, seeing Chunky Kong and Diddy Kong in the stands when Mario and Donkey Kong were fighting brought a smile.

Bowser is easily the best part of the story. Jack Black nails it, as I suspected he would. All of Bowser’s scenes were hilarious and awesome. Most of the characters were well-written and well-voiced. This includes Bowser, Mario, Luigi, Toad, Luma, Kamek, and pretty much everyone else…except Peach and Donkey Kong.

Peach is basically the star for a good portion of the film. They didn’t go full “girl-boss” with Peach, but it sure seemed like they wanted to. Anya Taylor-Joy did a fine job voicing Peach, but her character being a more capable hero than Mario for most of the movie had me rolling my eyes. Mario was anything but super the vast majority of the film. For 90% of the story, Mario gets his butt kicked by just about everyone and everything.

Mario being a punching bag for most of the film, and Peach being “almost a girl-boss but not quite”, deflated any sense of magic or romance between Peach and Mario in scenes in which it was just them together, which is really unfortunate. The Fire Flower field scene in particular could’ve been special if it would’ve been handled properly, but that would’ve violated Hollywood’s dogma of: female characters cannot be feminine or damsels in distress no matter the cost.

If this movie was supposed to be a reflection of the games, Mario’s role should have been of being the knight errant of the Mushroom Kingdom. He’s nowhere close to that in this movie, and since Peach cannot be the damsel in distress, they basically substituted in Luigi to be the character that gets captured by Bowser.

Donkey Kong was irritating and completely mis-cast for his voicing. He didn’t sound anything remotely like Donkey Kong from the games. He sounded like a douchey, annoying frat-boy.

The use of contemporary pop music instead of choosing from the plethora of Super Mario, Mario Kart, and Donkey Kong Country tunes was egregious. A-Ha’s Take On Me tune when Mario and Peach are being escorted to the Kong Kingdom instead of featuring a Donkey Kong Country tune of some sort had me shaking my head. That was a huge missed opportunity. Also, while I love AC/DC, having Thunderstruck playing during the kart race was out of place. The Mario Kart games, especially Mario Kart 8, have tons of kicking jazz tunes that would’ve been more appropriate. The disrespect for the original music of both the Super Mario and Donkey Kong games was unfortunate. This movie could’ve been a fantastic opportunity to showcase the talents of Koji Kondo and David Wise, at least to some degree, but it was squandered.

Overall, The Super Mario Bros. Movie is about what I thought it would be: a well-animated, colorful movie with lots of fan-service in which Jack Black’s Bowser steals the show. It’s not terrible by any stretch, but I think this movie would’ve been much better if Nintendo would’ve had a Japanese studio make it and kept it away from Hollywood and its sensibilities. You don’t want to be over-critical of what is essentially a kids movie, but at the same time, Mario has fans of all ages, and you want to see him portrayed well in his first feature film. Nintendo didn’t fail, but they didn’t fully succeed either. This movie could’ve been amazing, but it was merely okay because of some choices and ideas that I suspect didn’t originate with Nintendo.