Rating: PG
Runtime: 1 hour, 44 minutes
Director: Rob Letterman
Quick Impressions:
When I went to see Avengers: Endgame with my parents, my dad leaned over during the Detective Pikachu trailer and whispered, “I have absolutely no desire to see this at all.”
Crestfallen, I was like, “Really?! It’s the movie I’m most excited about all summer!”
I’ve been one-hundred percent sold on Detective Pikachu from the beginning. My husband started getting excited more recently, but it had me at Ryan Reynolds. How can you not want to see a movie starring Ryan Reynolds as Pikachu? I feel that not buying a ticket to such a venture would be a terrible, soul-shattering mistake.
Every new thing I learned about this film made me want to see it more and more. You look at those posters and see Blade Runner with Pokémon. Whoever designed the tech-noir art promoting this movie is an absolute genius. You look at those genre-signalling posters, and you know exactly what to expect. Basically, mash the two Blade Runner movies together, replace replicants with Pokémon, swap out Ryans (Gosling for Reynolds), make the whole adventure PG, cut the runtime in half, et voilà! Detective Pikachu! Even the opening title sequence is evocative of Blade Runner. I love it so much.
For what it’s worth, I also kept thinking of classics of film noir (minus the dystopian tech) as I watched, especially The Big Sleep and Chinatown. (And now I’m thinking a little bit of Zootopia. Soon there will be an acknowledged subgenre of children’s animation devoted to movies like this.)
The Good:
Our entire family played Pokémon GO! back when it first came out. My younger son was a baby. I was always at the park, anyway, and our weekend “family activities” often involved driving around in the car for hours and then…driving around some more! Even now, my almost four-year-old is not great at behaving himself in restaurants or other places that don’t encourage decorum best suited to a daycare center or mosh pit (neither of which he has actually visited).
If you’re out walking around the park every day, anyway, why not hatch a few eggs, catch a few strays, and hit up a few gyms while you’re at it? (Of course, I rarely attacked gyms unless my son was asleep because you have to stay within range for a long time to do that, and his version of the game would be titled Pokémon GO GO GO GO GO GO GO! He’s not a great stopper!)
I watched one Pokémon animated series only extremely spottily (think six random episodes viewed years apart), and I never got into the games until I could suddenly play by walking around in the park (my favorite thing). But I did come to love Pokémon GO! It motivated my older kids to agree to get out and do stuff rather than sitting around at home. (I couldn’t believe that my older son was so excited to visit the botanical gardens until my husband mentioned there was an Arcanine nest there.) Pokémon GO! also encouraged me to discover new parts of the area where I’ve lived for the past twenty years. Because it was connected to Google maps, I suddenly discovered shortcuts I’d never known, found coffee shops I’d never frequented, and drove down streets I’d never taken. Even now, I get a flutter of excitement when I venture into this one neighborhood behind the grocery store because part of my brain still thinks, “There might be a Snorlax over here!”
(How fondly I remember the time a police officer pulled my husband over for driving very slowly through the park in the middle of the night. He seemed to suspect some illicit sexual adventure until he discovered our sleeping baby and our two kids trying their hardest to catch a particularly stubborn Bulbasaur.)
As a Pokémon GO! fan, I was excited to see all the different creatures I’d devoted years of my life to catching show up in a big budget Hollywood movie. Even before buying a ticket, I knew this film had extremely thoughtful art direction, good CGI, and Ryan Reynolds going for it. So you know it’s not some low budget mess, no matter what.
It was the genre-mashing goodness that really drew me, though. And as a noir homage, the movie delivers and then some. It’s so much like Blade Runner. I love it! In fact, I think I prefer it to Blade Runner, kind of the way I like watching The Simpsons parody Citizen Kane better than the actual film (its deserved acclaim notwithstanding). I also kept thinking of Chinatown, The Big Sleep, and (in anxious flights of fancy) The Maltese Falcon.
I’d love to see the film again because I’m sure I missed so many Easter Eggs for fans. I caught a lot of detective movie references and some Pokémon references, but I’m sure there are more I missed (particularly on the Pokémon side since I was so entranced with all the tech-noir stuff. There are also some jokes directed at 90s era kids referencing pop culture from that era.
We all loved Ryan Reynolds as Pikachu. He’s perfect in the part and makes the character so easy to become invested in. Also, he manages to be funny, the same way he’s funny in Deadpool but without any of the vulgarity at all. This movie is rated PG and doesn’t even push it. It is a clean, family-friendly movie. That makes it pretty tricky to be amusing. And I mean, no, the movie is not as funny as Deadpool, but if you go to a children’s movie expecting Deadpool, you have no one but your own expectations to blame for your disappointment. (By the way, have you heard about the theater that accidentally showed The Curse of La Llorona in the auditorium that was supposed to be Detective Pikachu? Apparently after the first scene, the theater was full of children sobbing in misery. I still don’t understand why nobody complained to the manager during the preview package. I mean, one horror trailer could be a fluke, but after that, I’d be walking my kids into the lobby and notifying a manager.)
Anyway, Ryan Reynolds is clearly the star, but Justice Smith is also good as Tim, the human lead. He’s given much, much, much better material to work with here than in the most recent Jurassic World. (In that movie, he seemed to be playing some imagined liberal guy as envisioned by someone who can’t stand people like that (whether they actually exist in that form or not).) Here he gets much better lines and a decent arc. He seems like a good actor, and the whole time I watched, I thought, “I know this guy is not related to Will Smith,” because I read about him after Jurassic World, “but he kind of reminds me of Will Smith at moments.” Maybe he’s modeling his persona on the young Will Smith? Regardless, he’s a good actor.
Kathryn Newton does not have as much to work with, but she’s also good as Lucy, the girl. (It’s really nice to see Newton in a larger role since I know her from being dead in Three Billboards, being there in Ladybird, and doing a brief guest arc on Dog With a Blog years ago.) I wish her lines had been more interesting, but she gives a good performance (though she’s definitely upstaged by her Psyduck who is amazing, a true scene stealing standout).
I love Bill Nighy and Ken Watanabe in everything. Each of them plays a noir stock character here. They’re great, especially Nighy who has the larger role. Suki Waterhouse and Chris Geere are really good, too. I also liked the score.
For me, this movie was a consistently pleasant and rewarding experience, though my younger son did make it nerve-racking at times. Early on, I thought something on screen had really excited him. Then he leaned over and whispered to me with great seriousness, “For my party…we could have a popcorn party. We could get balloons that were yellow and white…and pop them.” So he was not always one-hundred percent focused on the movie. Some elements of the complicated plot may lose very young viewers. (It is film noir, after all.) For very young children, the movie can be sort of talky and also occasionally very scary (the kind of thing ratings descriptions call mild peril). But there’s nothing a young child shouldn’t see, and there were plenty of kids in the theater the same age as my son. Meanwhile, my ten-year-old was loving every minute. I’d say eight to twelve is the perfect age for maximum enjoyment.
Best Scene:
My favorite moment in the entire movie is a reference to another (non-detective) film, a weird meta joke that pleased me so much I thought, “I wonder if Ryan Reynolds is responsible for this.” It could be the writer or the director who thought of it, of course. I just died with pleasure. It has to do with something we see briefly on a TV. On the ride home, my son said, “Yeah, I’ve always wanted to see that movie,” and I gushed gleefully, “It’s a not a real movie!” What a great extra touch to show the movie was made with love!
This moment impressed me so much because it reflected how deeply Detective Pikachu is in conversation with other movies. It’s such a love letter to tech-noir, and I love that they were able to find a way to make room within that genre for a children’s adventure that satisfies a young audience but also smartly comments on the genre its performing. This movie not only delights children, but it rewards their film buff parents, too!
That doesn’t count as a full scene, though. So maybe I liked best the moment when Tim and Pikachu are called into somebody important’s office and Pikachu comments on something being “very twisty.” I thought, “Wow! This is so film noir!” (Kind of the way people say, “That’s so punk rock!” (if people really do say that).) (Honestly, it’s impossible to watch that scene and not see that this is like a fuzzy, yellow remake of Blade Runner 2049. (It has a scene with Jared Leto with a very similar set up.) (Plus the character dominating this scene is like a noir staple.)
Best Action Sequence:
I absolutely love the cleverness that goes into the fight with the villain’s henchman near the end of the film. It’s such a thoughtful battle that makes great use of a Pokémon we’ve been waiting to see in action.
Best Visually:
The Torterra Garden is genuinely inventive and satisfying visually. It gives us that big action set piece we’ve long been expecting in a way that is creative and even beautiful. What comes next is even better! (I also liked what came right before, that “you go on ahead while I linger significantly behind” bit because then you have to wonder if there’s a Brigid O’Shaughnessy lurking in this movie.)
The Negatives:
The kids and I were all emotionally disappointed with the ending, not that we were surprised. My sixteen-year-old actually called it months ago, maybe even last year. I’ve heard him say it multiple times when the movie would come up in conversation, each time punctuating his prediction with, “I’m calling it now.” So basically, I watched the entire movie thinking he could be right, then thinking he probably was right, then thinking he definitely was right, then seeing him proven right and thinking, “Yep, he called it, all right.”
On paper, this ending is great. Intellectually, it makes total sense. But the thing is, the way it actually plays out, it’s almost soul crushing. You get really, really attached to a certain character, and because of that emotional bond, the ending is less good when it actually arrives than it seemed when your son called it months ago.
My almost-four-year-old had the strongest negative reaction. He misunderstood what was happening, started sobbing, and cried well into the end credits. My husband didn’t seem as dissatisfied as the rest of us.
“This is makes a sequel really tricky,” I said just a few minutes ago.
“Well, they’ll have to branch out with a different story set in the same universe,” he replied.
“Well, I’m not as sure I’d want to see that one!” I didn’t say that, but I’m saying it now.
The whole movie worked for me intellectually, but the ending was kind of like when Carrie Fisher died, making massive rewrites of Episode 9 necessary, and now we’ll never see what they were originally planning! (Obviously Fisher’s death was the greater tragedy. Her loss is deeply felt by her family, friends, colleagues, and fans. But the new Star Wars books really seemed to have something in mind for Leia, and I wish we could have seen that realized as Fisher herself expected it to be in the final film. But we can’t.)
Our disappointment with the ending of Detective Pikachu is not the same in degree, but it’s the same type of disappointment. If you allow yourself to enjoy the movie like a fan, to get sucked into its world and emotionally invested, then what happens to all these characters matters to you. And what happens here disappointed us. The ending is not badly written or poorly acted. In fact, what ultimately happens is a good idea that makes total sense (within this particular story, especially). But we wish (in an admittedly selfish way) that the movie had been less neat and more satisfying (for us). (Just forget about what’s best for Tim! We’re the ones who paid to see this!)
Other than that, I loved the movie, and so did my husband. My ten-year-old daughter loved it, too, but neither of her brothers shared her enthusiasm.
The sixteen-year-old said, “I think it’s a good thing I wasn’t too hyped for that one.” He complained that he could predict every single thing that happened and rated it a 5 or 6 out of 10. (“That’s not too bad,” my husband noted later. “It’s not passing,” I reminded him. In my way of thinking, all ratings below 7 are equally abysmal. Honestly, if it were school, you wouldn’t say, “I got a 20 on this assignment, but I got a 40 on this one.” You’d say, “I got two Fs.” But my way of thinking means all the movies should get a 10 since they even managed to get made and distributed. That’s why I refused to give a rating when they asked me. I find rating things impossible.
My daughter insisted that the movie was at least an 8 out of 10, maybe higher. I think if I had said, “It’s a 10,” she would have enthusiastically agreed with me, but I couldn’t commit to a number.
My three-year-old did not share my reticence and enthusiastically declared, “I give it one thousand!” When we attempted to explain to him how a scale of 1 to 10 worked, he added, “I give it one thousand, and a number between one and that is seventy.” So we all have our different rating systems. (It occurs to me now that by 5, my son may have meant average whereas when I hear 5, I think, “Fall on your sword to avoid further shame.”)
I will say that what he found predictable, I thought of as intentional performance of genre to the point that it was both participating in and parodying the genre (like Scream). This is a children’s movie about
Pokémon
, sure, but it was beautifully hitting every film noir beat. It was like Blade Runner meets Chinatown meets Mewtwo. And yes, you can predict what will happen, but you can also predict things that don’t happen. You watch and think, “Is this The Big Sleep or The Maltese Falcon?” Which double-crosses are real, which for show? Which shady noir stock character will turn out to be the actual villain? The real bad guy is easy to identify. But multiple characters are equally easy to identify as the bad guy. At one point, I had three possible scenarios in my head. One of them was correct. The other two remained shadows, never to be realized. The movie has a lot of fun with formula and genre expectations. (I mean, yes, when the villain was revealed, I could cry, “I knew it!” But I also would have “known it” if the story had gone in a few different ways because all of those options were equally possible and equally obvious.)
Maybe one issue might be that the movie seems slightly more invested in its noir side than its
Pokémon
side. As I said, I played Pokémon
GO! daily for a long time, but I watched the series only very occasionally, and I don’t think I’ve seen any of the other movies or played the Nintendo games (though I’ve recently inattentively watched my husband play through one on the Switch). So I’m not a Pokémon
expert, but maybe my son was hoping for more Pokémon
lore and references. The movie incorporates quite a few Pokémon
(and very cleverly), but I just loved the tech-noir stuff so much that I wasn’t on the lookout for familiar faces from past Pokémon
projects like my kids were.
I also thought during one scene, “This is the huge kind of action sequence that my son normally loves and I normally zone out during, and surprisingly this movie hasn’t had many scenes like this.” He later called out that scene as one part of the movie he did really like, so perhaps relative lack of Transformers level action was a negative for him. It’s a pretty talky movie.
Meanwhile, my three-year-old son was starring in his own action sequence during the movie. He just could not seem to sit down and hold still, but we did spend quite a long time in the car that day, so his behavior might say more about my parenting choices than about Detective Pikachu. Long stretches of the movie did not hold his interest, though he was intermittently delighted. Some scenes distressed him. They weren’t too intense as long as the good guys had the upper hand, but the instant things went wrong, he got very upset. I think he was too young to understand the plot completely, and some talky sequences bored him. He left his seat next to me fairly early and soon began whispering to his father, “Is it almost over?” every ten seconds.
As his brother carried him back to the car after the film, he asked him, “Did you like the movie, Buddy?”
He stunned us all by replying enthusiastically, “Yeah!”
The incredulous look on my son’s face as he suppressed a smile and replied, “You did?” was the funniest thing I saw that night.
On the way home in the car, after our youngest rated the movie one thousand, we asked him, “What was your favorite part?”
And he replied, “The candy!”
I feel that was an honest answer.
He also loved the free packs of
Pokémon
trading cards the theater gave us with every ticket and traded his accommodating brother to get a Lickitung, which he highly prized and showed me again and again throughout the night as he tried to convince me to play the Pokémon
game on the Switch. (He really liked the scene with the Lickitung.)
For me, the movie was great, but it seems to go over better with ten-year-olds than sixteen-year-olds or almost-four-year-olds. So if you’re thinking of taking your own kids, keep that in mind.
This is definitely a children’s movie. It is rated PG. Not PG-13. PG. It truly is made for a young audience. Some of the early jokes (pre-Pikachu’s arrival on the scene) don’t really land, but I think a lot of this is because the movie is for children and very much PG and nothing harder.
Overall:
I loved Detective Pikachu. I’d like to take my mother to see it, and my daughter wants to see it again, too. Actually, my husband and I may go again later this week instead of seeing a new movie. (We’re deciding between this and an encore viewing of Endgame. We didn’t get to see either of those side-by-side.) If you think you will like Detective Pikachu, you probably will. Just keep in mind that it is rated PG. Its humor is gentle, but I think its ability to make a children’s version of Blade Runner starring Pokémon is pretty brilliant. For a video game movie, it’s extremely well done.
