Pokémon Detective Pikachu (2019)

I’m still struggling to finish Ryan Reynolds’ latest grown-up action movie, 6 Underground, which is so relentlessly kinetic that it gives me motion sickness if I leave it on for longer than 20-minute intervals. But I was charmed by Pokémon Detective Pikachu, which is not a great or even good movie in many regards but at least stages competent action sequences. It’s by a tiny margin more emotionally alive than Michael Bay’s latest, even if most of the emotions are being experienced by uncanny, large-eyed models of children’s toys.

Approaching a live-action Pokémon movie, you can choose one of two tacks. You can assess on a scale based on movies in general, or you can accept it as a movie intended primarily for children and secondly for adults who still carry affection for a plainly childish game series. In the whole wide world of movies, Detective Pikachu is no great shakes. Other than the asides uttered by Reynolds’ title hero, which clearly seem to have been punched up, it’s woefully written, unsubtle and guilty of numerous plot update speeches that slow its momentum and don’t accomplish their purpose. It chooses to present the various arcane mechanics of the Pokémon games, like types, special powers, and evolution as bible for its world without explaining any of them, even though it’s not necessary for the story to do so. It seems like the kind of movie that parents would regret taking their kids to, not one that will bring them closer together. Honestly, if you don’t know that Magikarp are useless or why Jigglypuff singing karaoke is bad news, you’re going to be in for a lecture.

If you don’t have children, or any connection to Pokémon at all, this is not your movie. But if you have affection for the games, which haven’t changed at all in 20 years, what director Rob Letterman has accomplished here might tickle you. Detective Pikachu is set in a special city where Pokémon live and work alongside humans, and the best aspect of the movie is just establishing shots that roll through city streets, office blocks, TV sets, suspicious sci-fi laboratories, and places of business delivering sight gags about which jobs Pokémon in such an environment would hold. That’s it, that’s the movie. Also Reynolds essentially reprises his Deadpool persona in conducting a two-hour test of how dirty he can get away with his jokes being in a PG-rated Nintendo commercial, which turns out to be fairly dirty. Pokémon Detective Pikachu lands rather more of its star’s one-liners than does 6 Underground, which was purpose-written for the man, because the director understands atmosphere and timing and leaving space for jokes to land. Letterman’s really quite good. He’s made a better movie on screen than exists on the page, with his lighting, staging, and costumes delivering the kiddie noir feel at which the dialogue usually swings and misses.

The story follows the plot of the 3DS Detective Pikachu game rather faithfully, not the story of any of the main Pokémon games. Hero Tim (Justice Smith) travels to Ryme City after the mysterious disappearance of his estranged father and ends up investigating with a button-cute Pikachu in a deerstalker hat. The human cast is so small that there’s no surprise about who the real villain is. Kathryn Newton plays the cub reporter slash chaste love interest, Bill Nighy is the eccentric industrialist, Ken Watanabe is the police chief, and that’s about all there is to it. Letterman’s greatest accomplishment is taking the film more seriously than it really deserves. You can glibly describe the second act of this film as “Blade Runner with Pokémon,” but the director took way more care than necessary actually working out what that would look like and how to carry it out. The sets and tracking shots and lighting and disaster effects in Pokémon Detective Pikachu are consistently better than they really need to be to satisfy its target audience. When Letterman nods at Alien, or Three Days of the Condor, or Godzilla movies, he’s doing so with all the professionalism and seriousness his budget allows.That will probably go over the heads of kids, and it’s not enough to paper over the poor writing to appeal to general moviegoers, but for the adults who also still think Pokémon are pretty cute, the additional effort is appreciated.

There’s a lot of ideas that the movie doesn’t develop well. Tim is introduced as someone who is rebelling against his disappointing childhood by being as boring and straitlaced as possible. That’s funny but he doesn’t so much progress as transform the instant Pikachu is introduced. Newton’s character abandons her effort to talk like a 30’s screwball heroine after one scene. It’s vaguely suggested that everybody in this universe has one and only one special Pokémon that’s like their life partner or soulmate or whatever, but that’s not really supported by either the film or the games and also the twist ending makes a hash of the logic. A lot of the major plot reveals are handled by immersive 3D video recordings and it’s rather hand-waved who made these and how they’re being played back and what purpose it was all originally supposed to serve. The villain’s evil plan makes objectively no sense, but that’s par for the course for children’s adventure movies and anyway the big final battle is not bad. Some of the animated Pokémon look absolutely amazing — you’re going to fall in love with this Pikachu, it vastly out-emotes the young humans — and others of them look a bit lo-res and incomplete. There isn’t the least bit of consistency to the Pokémon games as far as the size and strength and lifestyle of these things, and the movie faithfully reflects that.

Making a video game movie that’s this reverent to its source material, such as it is, and also not completely unwatchable is an accomplishment. I couldn’t hang with Assassin’s Creed for more than 15 minutes, and I sincerely love those games. The “best” video game movie series to date is the Resident Evil flicks, which randomly sample character names and monster designs from the games and swap them over into a totally unrelated universe dreamed up by their director and star. Tomb Raider, Prince of Persia, you name it, even for people who are inclined to like these things these were failures. The Rock couldn’t save Rampage or Doom and The Rock can make practically anything sort of good. So this is what you need to know: Pokémon Detective Pikachu is not the first good video game movie. But it might be the first tolerable one that doesn’t totally lose the spirit of the game in translation.