A mediocre adventure film - 5/10

by The Movie Inspector

A mediocre adventure film, Pokémon Detective Pikachu is an easy-going movie that vividly presents its vast world and all the fascinating Pokémon. Although it has quite an interesting premise, an underdeveloped story denies it from reaching its full potential.

This video game based movie may not be perfect but it still manages to deliver decent entertainment that should please both fans and non-fans alike. The story keeps one invested all throughout, mainly due to its intriguing premise. However, as a whole it does feel rather underdeveloped as lots of the material introduced at first isn’t really touched on later. Regardless of this, seeing all these Pokémon for the first time in live-action was quite exciting. ‘Pokémon Detective Pikachu’ follows an amnesiac Detective Pikachu as he teams up with a boy searching for his missing father.

The film starts out rather dull and that dullness kind of remains in the mood of the film. It isn’t until Pikachu shows up that there’s a shift in tone and some more liveliness unfolds. Ryan Reynolds’ voice performance as Pikachu was probably the biggest highlight and he adds so much to this character, especially with his comedic lines. As for the other characters, many of them felt really two-dimensional and underused. The antagonist’s motivations weren’t really justified and his character lacked a great deal of depth. 

What I really liked seeing was how all the Pokémon were presented and especially how they interacted with one another. Obviously, Pikachu was great and Psyduck was hilarious, I really enjoyed all their scenes. The CGI for Pikachu was well done but clearly needed some work for the rest of the Pokémon. Pacing-wise, the movie does feel slow, especially at first but manages to remain somewhat entertaining all throughout. I think that Pokémon fans will enjoy this and I advise everyone interested to go ahead and give it a shot as soon as it gets released on the 13th of June.

 

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