Does not feel like this movie came out five years ago. Tim (Justice Smith) works for an insurance company in some little town, living a lonely existence. He travels to Ryme City, which is supposed to be a revolutionary place where people and Pokemon just coexist without Pokemon being pitted against each other in gladiatorial combat for our amusement. Unfortunately, he's there because his cop dad died in a car accident.
Tim hasn't seen his dad in years, the specifics having something to do with Tim's mother's passing, so he'd rather just close out affairs and leave. Unfortunately, his dad's Pikachu shows up, alive but amnesiac, and able to speak so Tim, but only Tim, can understand. So they work together, with a nosy wannabe journalist, played by Kathryn Newton, and there's conspiracies, underground Pokemon fight clubs, illegal genetic experimentation.
There's at least one decent twist I didn't see coming, and one surprise I really should have. The movie set it up on a tee. It's not the identity of the mastermind behind the conspiracy; that was telegraphed with big, blinking signs, though the movie does try to point you another direction.
Smith plays Tim as a mixture of terribly awkward in the nasal-voiced Jay Baruchel kind of way, and closed off. He's shut down emotionally and so his whole life has kind of ground to a halt. He's not going anywhere or really even thinking of going anywhere. The circumstances of his father's death force him to lower his walls and start caring again. Reynolds as Pikachu's voice is mostly what you expect of Ryan Reynolds these days. The jokes and
one-liners and the faux-panic. There are a few sequences where he
uses genuine emotion when speaking with Tim, and those work fine. Because they're being issued from a CGI Pikachu face? Maybe!
(I do wonder why Tim's dad, if he wanted to bridge the distance, didn't just, you know, go visit his damn kid instead of putting a train ticket in a birthday card he was presumably going to mail before all this happened. Nut up and take the risk to make the first move, instead of putting all the pressure on Tim.)
The movie, while being upfront that Smith thinks Newton's reporter character is cute, avoids a romantic subplot. Newton plays Lucy as confident and opportunistic, but not nearly as sure of herself as she acts. Faking it until she makes it.
One thing that caught in my mind was, Ryme City is supposedly a city for people and Pokemon to coexist, rather than Pokemon living in the wild. This is apparently an unusual thing in this world, and it's true that nobody really reacts to groups of what appear to be un-partnered Pokemon just hanging around. But it still looks like basically any city you might see in our world. There's nothing that really suggests accommodations were made for Pokemon and their specific needs. Like, why no canals to make it easier for Water-types to get around, or catwalks for climbing Pokemon to use? Hell, Pikachu complains about how many steps it takes him to cover the same distance as Tim, why no moving walkways?
As a counter-example, the Wachowski's Speed Racer movie, for all its faults, did depict a world where that particular kind of racing is the biggest sport in the world, and is long-established to were nobody in-story bats an eye at its quirks. Everybody's cars look like race cars, a racing team dressing up as Vikings is accepted without question or comment. It's weird to us, but not to them. Pokemon in the world of Detective Pikachu are clearly well understood, so why wouldn't a city designed to let them live there have more accommodations in, I don't know, door design or something? It still just seems like a city for humans, but all of them have essentially a pet.
2 comments:
I saw this at the cinema and quite enjoyed it, but that may be because we won free tickets.
That could help. I watched it via a friend's netflix account, and I don't think I liked it enough to where I'd have spent actual money to see it.
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