There are anime that adapt their manga extremely accurately, to the point where they might as well be substitutes to the source material, but which add something more to the equation that the manga didn't have. Death Note has an immensely powerful soundtrack, the best voice actors active in Japan at the time, and was aware of the legacy of certain moments of the manga and placed strong focus on them when adapting. JoJo part 5 took a similar approach to adaptation, but managed to fix certain minor aspects where the manga faltered. Even Monster, which sounds like something that should barely gain anything from being adapted accurately, had such a focus on accurately animating nuanced emotions in the faces of its characters. The Chainsaw Man Movie does nothing to make it stand out from other good adaptations in these regards.
I mention earlier that Reze Arc does almost none of what I want from a standout adaptation, because it does experiment with some very interesting animation and use of diegetic soundtracks in certain confrontations, something that can't be done within the manga medium, and that's when it felt like Fujimoto's true vision came through. Reze singing in the rain on the rooftop is the kind of cinema that Makima would appreciate I'm certain. It seems to me that the very occasional glimpses of unique uses of the film medium have been enough to convince people that this is better than it is. The film does also make too heavy use of CGI. Albeit not a myriad, but some notable scenes make the characters stand out like sore thumbs and not in a meta, meaningful way. The "car chase" scene looked like they ran out of budget. The character animation is gorgeous, but the backgrounds during scenes of movement rarely are. I need to still commend Kikunosuke Toya and Fairouz Ai as Denji and Power respectively, the cast is in no way bad, but those deliver their lines like their lives depended on it.
All this being said, I obviously still enjoyed it. It's Chainsaw Man, it's one of the most fun modern shonen series, the work of a true auteur, but one whose works seem to mostly excel when it stays within his own medium of expertise, as both this and the TV anime never managed to wow me the same as his manga have. I don't think it helps that so far, what's been adapted of the manga are some of my least favorite parts. It's everything that happens after this that got me hooked on Fujimoto. The anime so far has mostly adapted the parts before Fujimoto got into the rhythm of writing his most original concepts, these earlier parts of Chainsaw Man are slightly too reminiscent of his contemporaries and his inspirations. The final 20-30 minutes of continuous intense battling was the only part of the film that inspired awe in me, but even then, that also contained plenty of interpolations of more original ideas, and an overabundance of ill-fitting computer generated graphics.
I'm in between 'Recommended' and 'Mixed Feelings', but it is a good movie and a good anime, so I can't justify not recommending it despite my obvious grievances.