Who would have thought how immensely popular the movie would become? It became the most profitable movie based on a video game ever made, by a wide, wide margin, in just its opening week.
It's clear that Nintendo had learned their past lessons, and wanted to make this one right, and really give both the former 80's kids who grew up with the Mario games as well as the younger audience what they want. The movie pays great homage to the game franchise, is very faithful to the source material, has an absolutely humongous amount of references to the games, and it's innocent inoffensive fun.
There are, perhaps, some very slight deviations or liberties taken compared to the source material. Perhaps one of the stranger ones is the characterization of the main villain, ie. Bowser. For this movie they amped his villainy and evilness up to eleven. This is not a Bowser who tickles his victims until they talk. This is a Bowser who is ready to murder his victims by lowering them into lava to experience an excruciatingly agonizing death, just for the sake of it. This is a Bowser who is completely ready to nuke an entire city just to get Peach to agree to marry him. Not as in some kind of metaphorical "nuke". Literally nuke the city, with all of its inhabitants. And all this while thinking that it would coerce Peach to marry him. This is an outright psychopathic Bowser, not really the affably evil villain from most of the games.
But, ultimately, he was so well written and so well characterized that most people didn't really notice how psychopathic he is in the movie, and really liked his characterization. And, surprisingly, I didn't mind it either. The movie has been made so that it's somehow easy to miss how utterly psychotic he is, and how horrible the crimes are that he's attempting to commit.
What I didn't like as much was the characterization of Princess Peach. Not as in she was badly written or her characterization and behavior badly executed. I found her characterization to be boring.
You see, in most of the games Peach is a very refined well-mannered lady, very royal in her demeanor, always acting in a very classy but likeable and nice way, who really cares about her subjects and wants nothing but to protect them and what's best for them.
That last part is true in the movie as well, of course, but not so much the first part. For the movie they chose the "action girl Princess Peach" characterization from some of the games (I believe mostly from some of the Super Smash Bros games) rather than the "royal refined lady Princess Peach".
On a side note, I read somewhere that the people at Hollywood scriptwriting the movie originally wanted to make her significantly more obnoxious, your typical modern "feminist icon" who acts like a complete jerk towards the male protagonists and is completely insufferable, but Nintendo stepped in and stopped that from happening. In other words, as much of an "action girl" that she is in the movie, she's actually a lot tamer than she would have been if Nintendo hadn't intervened. She is actually nice and likeable, and respects Mario and the others.
That being said (and kudos to Nintendo for stepping in), I still find her characterization to be very boring.
Why?
Because she is just Yet Another Action Girl, the same thing that can be seen in literally thousands of cartoon/CGI movies and TV series with "action girls" in them. She literally does not stand out in any way from the myriads of other similar characters. She's essentially just a carbon copy of your typical (and by this point really boring) action girl archetype. The archetype that has been seen literally thousands of times in hundreds and hundreds of movies and TV series.
If she had been depicted as the highly refined well-mannered upper class lady that she is in most of the games, that would have actually made her more unique, to stand out more from the crowd. This is most definitely not the typical depiction of a female protagonist in movies. It would have made her more interesting just by the mere fact that it's so rare to see such characters.
I do wonder, however, if they had the idea in this movie that this is a slightly younger Peach, someone who is still younger and wilder, and that the refined high-class well-mannered lady is a slightly older and wiser Peach many years later. After all, this is a sort of origin story of the entire Super Mario universe (at the start of the movie Mario and Luigi are yet to go or even know of the Mushroom Kingdom or anything not of the real world). I don't know if this was their idea, or whether they just wanted an "action girl Peach" just for the sake of it, but I suppose it could be a plausible explanation for the choice in this movie.
Even if it is, I still find her character to be boring. It would have been so much more interesting if she had been the refined lady.
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