The movie is good, I enjoyed it a lot more then I thought I would. It was surprising how well Mario is portrayed. He has flaws to overcome but he is resilient and is motivated by wanting to protect his little brother, in the end he becomes a hero and saves everyone. On the other side we have Peach, she is just perfect, does everything good all her life, effortless throws Mario to the ground and makes fun of him being short the first time she meets him, she is loved by everyone and she can fight better then anyone and even saves Mario at least once. She defeats Bowser and fights a good portion of his army on her own and only lost by sheer bad luck. Her saving grace is that she does not act as a mean girl boss and and seems to like Mario.

From a movie point of view Mario should not have mattered since Peach could have defeated everyone anyway and the fact that Mario is allowed to fight Bowser at the end seems extremely forced and more like something Nintendo demanded. Makes no sense for Peach not fighting him since she was stronger and better then Mario.

Even Donkey Kong is a more interesting and better written character then Peach. In fact Peach is the worse written character in the movie. You can remove most of the scenes with Peach and the movie plays about the same, almost like there were 2 story lines, one centered on Peach and one on Mario.

So it just looks like they wanted a girl boss movie but Nintendo said no and demanded Mario to be the hero of the movie so we got this strange mix of great and woke.

It also made me think, the argument I've seen online is "imagine if a girl goes to see Mario and Peach does nothing for the entire movie?". The obvious answer is that there can be a middle ground and the girl have flaws and even allow Mario to save her once or twice and also be a great and powerful character in her own right. But more importantly where was the same argument for Elsa or Brave or most other girl centered cartoons? Even How to train your dragon had to have a strong female character and that was the last good cartoon I remember seeing in a cinema that I liked.