Summary
The global phenomenon gets its first live action film and plays it pretty safe. You will believe a Pikachu can talk.
For over twenty years, the merchandising dream of Pokémon has been a part of the pop culture landscape. Since their debut in 1996, Satoshi Tajiri and Ken Sugimori’s simple collectable concept has gone on to spawn dozens of games, animated series, movies, plush toys, and countless imitators. POKÉMON: DETECTIVE PIKACHU is the first live action adaptation of the characters.
Mixing western motifs with the Japanese originals, along with specific elements of the 2016 videogame of the same name, the film introduces us to Tim Goodman (Justice Smith). Learning that his estranged father has been killed in an accident, Tim travels to Rhyme City, a place where Pokémon and humans coexist. There he meets Detective Pikachu (voiced by Ryan Reynolds), a super smart Pokémon that only Tim can understand. Together they try and solve the mystery around the accident.
In the tradition of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and more recently The Happytime Murders, there is a certain appeal to this motif. Seeing beautifully rendered CG versions of Pokémon seamlessly interacting with humans in a high tech city is an immersive experience at first. Rhyme City is like a not-too-distant-future Tokyo filled with plush mascots on every corner. So, Tokyo.
Where POKÉMON: DETECTIVE PIKACHU comes undone is in its on-rails plotting. It boggles the mind that the four credited screenwriters – Dan Hernandez, Benji Samit, director Rob Letterman, and Derek Connolly – could only come up with a narrative that plays out like a lesser version Zootopia. ‘A’ logically follows ‘B’ as a MacGuffin leads them to an obvious solution, dumbed down enough to play to a perceived lowest common denominator. It’s like a long cut-scene where you keep hitting the start button to skip the cut scenes, but they won’t let you play.
It is gorgeous to look at though, and as a technical achievement there is much to admire about Letterman’s film. The vast forests look otherworldly yet familiar. Huge turtles of enormous girth carry mountains on their backs. A Pokémon parade, in which the film seems to honour itself, looks real enough to have been shot in New York around Thanksgiving.
Justice “Paper Towns” Smith is a charismatic lead, although Kathryn Newton is so over the top as to be a caricature. (Although in terms of being an anime translation, she’s approximating that quite well). Having voiced one CG creation across multiple films, Reynolds is effectively a fuzzy Deadpool – but it kind of works in this context. Ken Watanabe is horribly underused while Bill Nighy does that thing he does and does it well.
Much of your enjoyment of POKÉMON: DETECTIVE PIKACHU will depend on a familiarity with the world. There are countless Easter eggs in there for fans, but initiates will just see a mass of unrecognisable CG background noise. Relying heavily on formula and name-brand recognition, this might be a step in the right direction for building additional story elements around the franchise, but adult viewers may be at constant war with their inner (or actual) children.
2019 | US, Japan | DIRECTOR: Rob Letterman | WRITERS: Dan Hernandez, Benji Samit, Rob Letterman, Derek Connolly | CAST: Ryan Reynolds, Justice Smith, Kathryn Newton, Suki Waterhouse, Omar Chaparro, Chris Geere, Ken Watanabe, Bill Nighy | DISTRIBUTOR: Roadshow Films | RUNNING TIME: 104 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 9 May 2018 (AUS)
