Pokémon Detective Pikachu
Raymond Chandler and Psyduck collide in this live-action/computer-animated reinvention of the Pokémon franchise, with Ryan Reynolds providing the voice for a hard-boiled Pikachu P.I.
We'll say one thing for Pokémon Detective Pikachu: it looks gorgeous. Mostly taking place in Ryme City, a town in which humans and Pokémon live cheek-by-jowl, the film looks like an early Walter Hill movie, the neon-lit streets forever glistening from a recent rainstorm. It's the perfect atmosphere for a neo-noir in which a young man (Justice Smith) teams up with a coffee-guzzling private eye (Ryan Reynolds) to discover the conspiracy behind his father's death. What adds a wrinkle is that the P.I. is Pikachu, a three-foot-tall rodent with canary yellow fur who's cute as a button and can shoot bolts of electricity from his zig-zagging tail.
Pikachu and his brethren were all the rage back in the 90s thanks to the headache-inducing Pokémon TV show and the franchise's pocket money-gobbling trading cards. The recent rise of Pokémon GO, the augmented reality game in which grown adults hunt imaginary creatures with their mobile phones, has only added to these pocket monsters' popularity. Strangely, though, this big-screen version doesn't concern itself too much with what Pokémon fans love most – the bagging of the creatures and the epic battles between them – but on the livewire charms of Ryan Reynolds as the pint-size detective. Jacked-up on lattes and wise-cracking a mile-a-minute, the performance would have been a delight if there was anything of substance around it.
It's hard to pin down exactly who Pokémon Detective Pikachu is for. The noir plot is deeply unsatisfying while the cute gags are aimed squarely at kids in the audience, most of whom will struggle to follow the wildly convoluted story strands; their parents won't do much better. And while we're sure Pokémon-nuts will get a kick out of seeing cameos by the likes of Charizard and Jigglypuff, those less well-versed in the mythos will be left scratching their heads.
The touchstone is clearly Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Robert Zemeckis' wildly inventive action-comedy in which a hard-boiled detective joins forces with a cartoon bunny to uncover corruption in Toontown. But unlike Zemeckis, Detective Pikachu's director Rob Letterman fails to weld the worlds of Roman Chandler with the idiosyncratic charms of characters like Psyduck and Magikarp. What we're left with is Reynolds being a PG-friendly goofball for 100 minutes, which might have been entertaining if we had a clue what was going on around his cute avatar.
Released 10 May by Warner Bros