I want to be nice to this one for the valiant attempt recreating the magic of the television cartoon to a live action movie, but despite my sympathy, the elements just don't add up into a cohesive whole.

Where did it go wrong? On the surface, the right decisions are made: the same tongue-in-cheek humor that works on more than one level, some reasonable extrapolation into the larger live action world, and what I'd call decent use of cameos (that's debatable, but for this kind of movie, its ham-handed approach seems alright).

The original cartoons worked because their tales were based in simple concepts that were exaggerated for humor and commentary. For a feature-length film, this gets lost. They have to make the pretense of a plot that fills that time, yet the plot is largely dismissed by the sensibilities of the film. We are left with a plot that doesn't matter, but supposedly it doesn't matter that it doesn't matter. So when something happens, there's little reason to think much of it.

Perhaps the film scores will with kids, but there's not much left for us adults to look at.