Like a lot of people my age, my childhood was full of the colorful abominations called Pokemon. I played those games fucking constantly growing up, dabbled in the card games, watched a lot of the real old TV show. Hell, I’ve got old VHS tapes of the shit in my parents’ house. This movie’s trailer made it look like a kind of love letter to the kids like me who liked this stuff in the late 90s. But in reality it’s a pile of dog shit with a Pokemon card on top.
SPOILERS FOR THE MOVIE WITHIN.
Director: Rob Letterman
Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Justice Smith, Kathryn Newton
Co-written with Tony.
I guess the story begins with this insurance salesman, Tim, is out with a buddy trying to hunt a Cubone when he learns his father dies – but really, the movie just wants us to forget that a grown man has to run for his life from a two-foot rat in a bone mask. How hard could it possibly be to capture that thing?
But yeah, his dad dies and he has to go to this city where Pokemon and humans live in harmony and don’t do any of the battling you’d expect out of this franchise. So it’s Pokemon with nothing cool about it, essentially. Riveting! We find this out through some truly wretched exposition – it’s just shown on a train TV screen ad, conveniently for the beginning of the movie. I dunno about you, but whenever shit like this shows up on Hulu or Spotify, I tune out. It wouldn't be an effective method to convey backstory.
In the city, we get some painfully stock scenes flashing back to Tim’s childhood where he lost his mom. I know it’s supposed to be sad, but this and every other emotional moment in the film seems like it was taken from a giant corporate warehouse with CLICHE SCENES & PLOTS written on the side.
Fortunately the titular talking Pikachu, voiced by Ryan Reynolds, shows up soon after that. Sure, ‘Ryan Reynolds plays a talking Pikachu’ sounds like something you and your friends came up with in 15 minutes while you were high off your asses. But it does provide for some funny moments. There’s some half-decent absurdist comedy to watching him run around and seeing the other Pokemon doing goofy shit. Unfortunately, that isn't enough for a full hour and forty-minute movie.
The problem is that everything aside from the weirdness and humor of the Pokemon is utterly phoned in. There’s a budding romance between Tim and Kathryn Newton’s junior reporter character Lucy. It’s every bit as lame and awkward as you’d expect; retro in the sense that we quit doing these types of hack storylines in the 90s because they were bad. Oh, he makes some awkward Freudian slips and Pikachu ribs him about it? Stop the presses! The fantastic Bill Nighy is wasted as the rich guy businessman who turns out to be a villain later. Awesome twist if you’ve never seen a movie in your life.
Everything is by the book and the story is a practically just a bunch of cliches patched together with rubber bands and cheap glue. There are some emotional scenes that don’t pack any punch because every line and every story beat is predictable and hollow. Like, really, are they going to let Pikachu die in this Detective Pikachu movie by being hit with a rock? Are they going to keep Pikachu and Tim apart when, right after being saved from dying, Pikachu arbitrarily decides to go on his own to stop anyone else from being hurt? I mean, wow, I was really surprised when everything turned out OK after those incredibly stale cliché tropes you guys trotted out like fat out of shape race-horses.
One of the worst parts is how they do exposition and revelations of story elements like how Pikachu lost his memory or what happened to Tim’s dad. Basically Nighy’s character invented this virtual reality camera thing that can show what happened in the past “from all angles,” effectively giving the characters an extremely hacky way to see what happened – conveniently it’s able to show everything perfectly in a neat way that explains stuff! I’d say this is spoon-feeding you exposition, but really it’s like tying you down Guantanamo-style and shoving a feeding tube forcefully into your nostrils and flushing the exposition in that way.
The climax is truly horrible, with Bill Nighy putting his brain into Mewtwo’s body. I guess his character, who is in a wheelchair, wants to merge with Pokemon to “heal” everyone in the world or some stupid shit like that. I’ve seen this ‘disabled villain wants to cure the world in an evil way’ trope before and usually done better. But as a disabled person, it’s not realistic – we’d probably just kill people like any other type of villain. We’re not that noble.
Nighy as Mewtwo spends the finale spouting out lines that somehow top even the previous cliches in the movie, which I find an amazing feat. All the good humor from earlier is long gone, and the movie bafflingly delivers this totally straight-faced, no irony at all. If actors could be punished for crimes by being forced to do horrible scenes in movies, this one would be the punishment for a triple homicide.
Maybe I’m being too harsh – there are a few OK jokes and it’s nice to see some Pokemon on screen, I guess, though it’s been ages since I was super into this stuff. Maybe some will like it better. It’d probably be a blast if I was drunk or high, watching the first act or two anyway. But overall there are way better kids’ movies you could see. Just make sure you cover your kids’ eyes at the part where Pikachu commits genocide against a bunch of Digimon. That shit was horrific to watch.
Image copyright of its original owners, I don't own any of it.
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