Pokemon Detective Pikachu will only be seen by four types of people:
- Children
- Parents who were begged by their children to pay admission
- Twenty-somethings who remember the franchise from when they were children
- Film critics
There's the problem, the film doesn't know its audience, which is kids. My theater was packed with mostly kiddos and their guardians, who jumped for joy as they entered the movies but walked without such passion once the credits scrolled. I'm sure they enjoyed it, but I doubt they "got" it. The plot, which I'll get to in a second, was both too familiar and too complicated, and although Ryan Reynolds, who voices the titular Pikachu, got a few laughs with his "PG-Deadpool one-liners," it wasn't enough to sustain any sort of kinetic energy. Kids ultimately will end up liking all the bright colors, but that's all there is.
Oh I'm sorry, there I go assuming everyone and their child knows who Pikachu is, and what Pokemon are. In short, Pokemon are animal-like creatures from the self-titled franchise, and Pikachu, an electric mouse, is their mascot and a main character in this first live-action adaptation. The film acts like a safari, traveling across the damp city streets with dozens if not hundreds of cameos of different Pokemon. I'm sure that will tickle the fancy of children and adult-children, but their "blink-and-you-missed-it" scenes are ultimately inconsequential.
Getting to the plot, we follow Tim Goodman (Justice Smith), one of the few folks in the world who doesn't have his own Pokemon companion, an insurance salesman who's lived with his grandmother most of his life after his mother's death (a terrific theme for a picture opening Mother's Day Weekend). After a phone call, he travels to Ryme City, a sprawling municipal where people and little creatures live in harmony and as equals. But he's not there to sell them insurance! He meets with the local detective (Ken Watanabe) where we find out his father is presumed dead (could have used life insurance), but Tim hides his emotion and goes to close down his dad's apartment.
There he meets Lucy Stevens (Kathryn Newton), a wannabe reporter who is eager for her "big-break" and thinks that his father's death could be it. Why? During the crash that allegedly killed him, there was an explosion at a nearby lab, which has had no media coverage. Once inside the apartment, Tim stumbles upon Pikachu, Tim's father's amnesic Pokemon and partner who is unique in that Tim can understand him, and he can speak English (makes you wonder how the whole "living as equals" thing works when the two diverse cultures can literally not speak to one another, but I digress). Pikachu convinces Tim that his father isn't really dead and that it's a coverup, so the two set out to the streets, where they end up working with Lucy, and quickly are hot on the trail of "R," a sort of drug that is used by people to make their Pokemon go bezerk (which is brilliant anti-drug messaging if I've ever seen it, making kids pay to hear that drugs are bad).
Phew! Some narrative huh? And I haven't even gotten to the bad guy! But that's the major flaw here, the writers mistook multiple, overly-familiar plots for one unique, well-rounded one. There are kidnapping, cloning, government controlling the media, and just about every plot-point a film could hit, only a handful are well executed, the others are just, well, executed. They're either too vague, too adult for a kids movie, or just never followed up on. Even the ending, which I won't spoil, features a twist which is sitcom-level obvious. But the biggest crime is the human characters, who while not unlikable per se, they just exist next to significantly more interesting CGI monsters who receive none of the creative exposition.
Oh I'm sorry, there I go assuming everyone and their child knows who Pikachu is, and what Pokemon are. In short, Pokemon are animal-like creatures from the self-titled franchise, and Pikachu, an electric mouse, is their mascot and a main character in this first live-action adaptation. The film acts like a safari, traveling across the damp city streets with dozens if not hundreds of cameos of different Pokemon. I'm sure that will tickle the fancy of children and adult-children, but their "blink-and-you-missed-it" scenes are ultimately inconsequential.
Getting to the plot, we follow Tim Goodman (Justice Smith), one of the few folks in the world who doesn't have his own Pokemon companion, an insurance salesman who's lived with his grandmother most of his life after his mother's death (a terrific theme for a picture opening Mother's Day Weekend). After a phone call, he travels to Ryme City, a sprawling municipal where people and little creatures live in harmony and as equals. But he's not there to sell them insurance! He meets with the local detective (Ken Watanabe) where we find out his father is presumed dead (could have used life insurance), but Tim hides his emotion and goes to close down his dad's apartment.
There he meets Lucy Stevens (Kathryn Newton), a wannabe reporter who is eager for her "big-break" and thinks that his father's death could be it. Why? During the crash that allegedly killed him, there was an explosion at a nearby lab, which has had no media coverage. Once inside the apartment, Tim stumbles upon Pikachu, Tim's father's amnesic Pokemon and partner who is unique in that Tim can understand him, and he can speak English (makes you wonder how the whole "living as equals" thing works when the two diverse cultures can literally not speak to one another, but I digress). Pikachu convinces Tim that his father isn't really dead and that it's a coverup, so the two set out to the streets, where they end up working with Lucy, and quickly are hot on the trail of "R," a sort of drug that is used by people to make their Pokemon go bezerk (which is brilliant anti-drug messaging if I've ever seen it, making kids pay to hear that drugs are bad).
Phew! Some narrative huh? And I haven't even gotten to the bad guy! But that's the major flaw here, the writers mistook multiple, overly-familiar plots for one unique, well-rounded one. There are kidnapping, cloning, government controlling the media, and just about every plot-point a film could hit, only a handful are well executed, the others are just, well, executed. They're either too vague, too adult for a kids movie, or just never followed up on. Even the ending, which I won't spoil, features a twist which is sitcom-level obvious. But the biggest crime is the human characters, who while not unlikable per se, they just exist next to significantly more interesting CGI monsters who receive none of the creative exposition.
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