Calling Pokémon — Detective Pikachu the best video game movie ever made feels a lot like damning it with faint praise. After all, while I have soft spot for Warcraft, and there has to have been some sort of fanbase for the Resident Evilses since they kept making those goddamn things for so long, the history of video game films has been largely akin to a ten-car-pile-up into a train into a dumpster filled with diapers that’s been set on fire. The bar is low, is the point.
But Detective Pikachu is not ‘good for a video game movie’. It’s a legitimately fun and inventive family adventure that boasts some of the most casually miraculous visual effects in any film this year. Pokémon has been around for so long, across so many forms of media besides live action film, that the world of pocket monsters and their trainers is as densely realized as any Wizarding World or Galaxy Far Far Away. With Detective Pikachu, director Rob Letterman has brought that world to dazzling life, and I can’t imagine we won’t get a number of return trips.
On the surface, Detective Pikachu seems like the strangest possible tactic to take in bringing these characters into live action for the first time. The Detective Pikachu game wasn’t even released in America before this movie was announced, leading to no end of head-scratching when the project started developing. But it turns out that this was something of a masterstroke, as Detective Pikachu works wonderfully as a completely self-contained adventure that also sets the world of Pokémon up in such a way that future filmmakers can now go forward telling as many stories, and as many different kinds of stories, as they see fit.
This particular story concerns Tim Goodman, (Justice Smith, from The Get Down, now like seven feet taller than he was on that show) just an average young man in a world populated by magical, super-powered creatures that are regularly snapped up in Pokeballs and then entered into fighting competitions by their ‘trainers’.
God damn is this a weird franchise.
Anyway, Tim’s quiet life is upended when he is informed that his long-absent father, Harry, an acclaimed police officer and detective, has gone missing and is presumed dead. Tim heads to Ryme City, a utopic metropolis where human and Pokémon live side by side, the Pokémon treated not as pets or fighters or prizes, but as partners and companions, like familiars or the daemons out of His Dark Materials (you are goddamn right I will make this Detective Pikachu review somehow even nerdier). The only trace of Tim’s vanished father is Harry’s Pokémon partner: a Pikachu clad in a Sherlock Holmes-ian deerstalker. But whereas most Pokémon can only say their own name, this Pikachu speaks in the mile-a-minute, Deadpoolian patter of Ryan Reynolds, heard only by Tim.
A reluctant Tim partners with Pikachu, along with intrepid young reporter Lucy (Kathryn Newton, Reese Witherspoon’s daughter on Big Little Lies/Claire from Supernatural) and her Pokémon partner, Psyduck, the greatest character in any movie ever made. Together the group dig into Harry’s last case, which takes them right into the upper echelons of Ryme City, including Bill Nighy as Howard Clifford, the kindly architect of the city.
Also Mewtwo is there.
Detective Pikachu isn’t so dense with Pokémon lore as to be unintelligible madness for anyone who’s never played the game, like, well, Warcraft (just to establish my own ignorance bonafides, I haven’t played a Pokémon game or touched a card since fifth grade, and even as a kid I never watched the cartoon or the animated films. Nigh on blank slate, baby). But the movie also doesn’t feel the need to hold any hands. It assumes that you either have a glancing knowledge of the basic parameters of this over-twenty-years old cultural institution and goes from there, casually indulging in the weirder corners of this universe.
At times, Detective Pikachu plays like the single most high-end fan fiction production ever mounted. Letterman surprised me with his actually quite good Goosebumps movie a couple years back, but he’s leveled up tremendously here. Shot on film, Detective Pikachu oozes neon noir atmosphere in its early sections, taking visual cues equally from Michael Mann’s ’80s output and the classic Bogart-led detective films. Using what appears to be almost entirely practical sets, Letterman, cinematographer John Mathieson and the visual effects team create the perfect playground for the Pokémon to exist.
And holy God do they exist. I don’t think there’s even so much as a single shot in the film without a Pokémon on screen, but they are realized so expertly that at a certain point you forget the magic involved in bringing these things to life and just accept them and their world. Design-wise, these adhere very closely to the classic look from the games and animation, but brought into three dimensions and textured like living creatures. Detective Pikachu does as effective a job at building out the feel and logistics of its world as anything since Who Framed Roger Rabbit, something that feels even more tremendous in the wake of the soul-eating nightmare that is the Sonic from the Sonic the Hedgehog movie they got going.
Smith and Newton make an appealing central duo to hang the film around. Both actors have the quietly impossible task of spending virtually every single scene interacting with their respective Pokémon companions, and neither ever lets the illusion drop. Smith in particular invests so much energy and soul into Tim’s relationship with Pikachu that he’s as directly responsible for bringing the character to life as Reynolds’ voice and all the millions poured into CGI.
Speaking of Reynolds, he’s a wild choice for that role and much of the film’s humor is derived from the never-not-funny disparity between his trademark fast-talking snark and the none-more-adorbs appearance of Pikachu. Post-Deadpool, Reynolds and Hollywood both seem to have cracked that he only works as the lead in a film if he is actively trolling everything around him, and the amnesiac, wildly over-confident Pikachu makes a bizarrely good fit. Some of his one-liners hit with a hard thud and veer too close to PG-Deadpool territory for comfort, but generally this proves to be a good fit between character and performer.
Other faces like Nighy, Ken Watanabe as a local detective, and Chris Geere from You’re the Worst as an obnoxious media broker all lend legitimacy to the cartoon proceedings and further the mystery. I saw some people knock this movie when it hit theaters as being ‘baby’s first film noir’ like that was a bad thing. I mean…yeah, guys, for many, many, many people across the globe, this will indeed be their introduction to the tropes and tenets of film noir. You’re talking about a generation who not only don’t know Chinatown yet, they maybe haven’t even seen Roger Rabbit! As such, Detective Pikachu’s mystery may be a softball down the middle, but the script does an effective job at developing and resolving its mystery in a way that is both in line with the archetypes of this genre, and also playfully specific to the rules and world of Pokémon.
Detective Pikachu is that rare studio production where the weird choices all came together to make something that just straight-up works, end to end. And the film is mercifully free of the cinematic universe tics that have turned so many recent studio films into little more than bloated advertisements for theoretical future installments. Every single thing introduced and set-up in Detective Pikachu is resolved and paid off before the credits hit, and I didn’t even realize how much I missed that kind of basic, functional storytelling until those credits rolled and I was left surprised by how satisfied I felt by the film.
I imagine Pokémon fans will be delighted to go through the film piece by piece to scour for every Easter egg and cameo, of which there are undoubtedly many. For everyone else, the Detective Pikachu Blu-ray has a number of fun featurettes that make the disc an even better buy.
Pokémon’s been around, and popular, for so long that a live action film was inevitable. But it didn’t have to be this film, and it didn’t have to be this weird, and it didn’t need to be this good. Even with that being the case, everyone brought their absolute A-game, resulting in one of the happier surprises of the year. Here’s hoping this is only the first of many trips to Ryme City, and all the regions beyond.