The Super Mario Bros. Movie

I love that the movie went all CG and the aesthetic design choice replicated the designs of most things from their respective sources well. The environments that the characters inhabited were probably the best part of the technical side of the movie. It would have been the soundtrack, but knowing that some of the original scores for scenes got replaced with generic mainstream slop really hurt its score. I mean seriously, how the hell is a-ha the better choice than an original orchestral rendition of the Donkey Kong Country theme that was composed in a way that makes sense in the scene it takes place in while still being catchy as hell? There really needs to be a cut of this movie that restores all of the original compositions because they were composed in a way that used the sources in a reasonable way that wasn't just a collection of the original music.
Speaking of which, there weren't as many memberberries as I initially thought there were gonna be, but there are still plenty to be found. There were a handful of Easter eggs that were actually treated like so, but a few of them kind of did cross into the memberberry territory like the model Arwing in Mario's room and the drift-boosting on Rainbow Road. Then there were those that just didn't make any sense to have in at all like the baby Mario and Luigi reminiscing scene and that Luma in the cell, who plays the whole nihilistic child joke super-safe and suffers in the humor department greatly because of it. And no, the characters reacting to him in a negative way does not make it funny with self-awareness. They don't have the balls to make that kind of commentary.
And by the way, the jokes were either "ugh"-inducing or just "whatever" sauce virtually the whole way through. I only chuckled at one joke during the family dog scene, but that was it.
The performances were kind of a mixed bag. I liked Toad and Luigi's castings, but everyone else was just empty-calorie celebrity bait. Jack Black's performance as Bowser was very hit-and-miss; he has a good voice for the character, but he constantly slips out of it throughout his screen time. I hated that they made the character have an "I'm horny for her" side because it deteriorates the menacing personality that DOES work for him as an intimidating villain. Also, that Peaches song is terrible and NOT in a good way. It had no focus or passion put into it and there was nothing funny about it. If it tried to be a "so-bad-its-good" kind of thing, it failed in that department too. It just seemed like an excuse to get a Tenacious D song in a movie without it having a purpose in the movie outside of being a mainstream meme.
I don't believe that a movie has to have a good story in order to be good, but if a story is going to be the at the forefront of the movie, it needs to not be designed so as lazily as it was here. The characters weren't fleshed out very well at all and there was almost no sense of development between them, especially between Mario and DK. It's like they just kept skipping rungs on ladders because they were afraid of boring the audience. But it wouldn't be boring if you knew how to handle it in a compelling manner.
But then again, this IS an Illumination movie after all. It's one of their better ones, but knowing how low their bar is, clearing it is not an accomplishment worth being proud of. This movie showed so much promise being what it is. It just needed a better animation studio working on it-- one that doesn't treat the craft like just a marketable medium of entertainment to sell stuff to kids like DreamWorks or something.

And YES, I do play plenty of Mario games, because that matters for some reason... but not if you like the movie, apparently.
I don't understand the internet.