‘Detective Pikachu’ Might Be The Weirdest, Best Video Game Movie Ever Made - Forbes

Detective Pikachu

The Pokemon Company

Everyone was rather confused when it was announced that the first live-action Pokémon movie ever made was going to be…Detective Pikachu. The spin-off game is hardly one of the most prominent games in the Pokémon series, and debuting a story on the big screen staring a Pikachu that actually talks is…a seemingly weird decision.

But one that ultimately paid off.

Detective Pikachu is very good, at least in most ways. It is absolutely the most satisfying fully realized video game world ever put to screen, and in an era when people can’t even make a CGI Sonic the Hedgehog look not-creepy, it is simply amazing that all the Pokémon here look absolutely fantastic, and their integration into the world and the story is top-notch. This was not a story based around the traditional catching and battling of Pokémon, though there is some of that, but how the Pokémon are used in the film is fantastic, and the “real world” designs of them are all stellar, especially furry, emotive Pikachu, voiced by Ryan Reynolds.

Reynolds does a great job as Pikachu, and it seems like a perfect match now that I’ve seen the full film. He’s funny, heartfelt, adorable everything I would hope a, uh, talking Pikachu would be. I was similarly impressed with Justice Smith, who brings a lot of depth to a role that theoretically didn’t need it, but it’s his understated performance balanced off Reynolds’ Pikachu that makes up the core of the film. He doesn’t need to be Ash Ketchum to make this Pokémon feature work.

Detective Pikachu

The Pokemon Company

So while I do recommend you see Detective Pikachu if you’re a Pokémon fan, I have to pivot to where the film falters, which is its truly bizarre plot. And now spoilers follow.

Even for a Pokémon movie, this is extremely weird. The chain of events here is just wild:

• Tim’s detective father and his Pokémon partner are killed in a car accident (dark!).
• His father’s partner, Pikachu, actually survives, and Tim can now hear him talk after Tim inhales some sort of mystery substance that also makes Pokémon go crazy for a short while. But Pikachu has amnesia and doesn’t remember what happened.
• Pikachu says that his father isn’t dead, just missing and that they have to find him.
• They realize it was Mewtwo who blew the car off the road, a secret geneetic project by an eccentric tycoon.
• But it turns out later it was hostile Greninjas working for the tycoon who flipped the car, and Mewtwo actually saved his father and erased Pikachu’s memory.
• The villain’s master plan is to mind control Mewtwo with a neural link, expose every Pokémon in the city to the dangerous gas, then while they are in that state, use Mewtwo's powers to put the minds of all humans into their partner Pokémon because…they can evolve after that? Unclear.
• This plan is foiled, and then it’s ultimately revealed by not-evil Mewtwo that he actually put Tim’s father into Pikachu’s body to save him, and that’s who he has been talking to this whole time. Why Tim never recognized his voice, I have no idea, but the two of them split and then we have Ryan Reynolds in person standing there, and a now normal Pikachu who doesn’t talk.

I mean, wow.

To say this is pretty convoluted is an understatement, and pretty much nothing any of the good or bad guys do makes much sense. It’s also a fairly predictable ending given that in half a dozen flashbacks you are not allowed to see Tim’s father’s face, meaning they’re hiding it from the audience. That means A) it’s someone from the story we would recognize (but there are no characters who would even qualify) or B) it’s Ryan Reynolds, and we would all recognize Ryan Reynolds and ruin the ending. It’s clumsy.

Detective Pikachu

The Pokemon Company

The whole Mewtwo/mind control/Pokémon combination/soul bonding thing is just…odd, and I would have preferred a good old Team Rocket heist or something as the major crux of the film rather than whatever this was.

In the end it’s not so weird and bad that it sinks the film, but it’s definitely the worst aspect. But the world, Reynolds and Smith all are good enough to make Detective Pikachu fully worthwhile, and any new or old Pokémon fans should check it out.

Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Read my new sci-fi thriller novel Herokiller, available now in print and online. I also wrote The Earthborn Trilogy.

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2019/05/12/detective-pikachu-might-be-the-weirdest-best-video-game-movie-ever-made/

2019-05-12 13:27:00Z
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