Pokémon meets film noir in this unlikely but suspenseful yarn
Detective Pikachu PG cert, 104 min ★★★★★ Dir Rob Letterman
Starring Ryan Reynolds, Justice Smith, Kathryn Newton, Bill Nighy, Ken Watanabe, Chris Geere, Suki Waterhouse
On the face of things, film noir might be the least appropriate genre imaginable for a Pokémon adventure, with the arguable exception of erotic thriller. Yet Detective Pikachu scampers into the urban murk with gusto. It’s hard to fathom why this laudably weird film exists until you realise an early development meeting must surely have thrown up Who Framed Roger Rabbit as a perfect example of How We’re Going To Make This Work. Robert Zemeckis’s 1988 part-animated masterpiece had an ideal setting – the big, dark, unfathomable city – to get its unlikely ensemble cast of humans and toons snuggled up jowl by cheek. This live-action spin-off from the long-running video-game franchise had to vault a similar hurdle: where can we put lots of people and Pokémon side by side, and have it look
relatively un-ridiculous? So it would have made sense for director and cowriter Rob Letterman to plump for an already-proven solution. And if you’re borrowing the setting – well, why not double down and pinch the mood too?
That’s certainly one possible explanation for the fact that Pikachu isn’t gambolling in the Kanto grasslands, but rather scouring the neon-washed streets of Ryme City for Harry Goodman, his human partner, who vanished in a car crash while trying to crack a particularly arduous case. Voiced by Ryan Reynolds with his sardonic Deadpool repartee dialled down to family-friendly levels, the custard-furred rodent enlists the help of Harry’s estranged teenage son Tim (The Get Down’s Justice Smith) – who happens to be the only person around who hears his cutesy chirruping as human speech. Together the pair dive into a mystery you couldn’t quite describe as hard-boiled, though it has definitely been simmered a bit longer than the Pixar/dreamworks standard.
For Pokémon fans, a huge part of the appeal of any live-action treatment would have been seeing its 8-bit menagerie take photoreal form. And in this respect – take note, Sonic the Hedgehog – Detective Pikachu is an eyeboggling triumph, with gorgeously realised creatures that sit seamlessly in their real-world surroundings, from Lickitungs to Jigglypuffs. This will have been made considerably trickier by the deranged decision to shoot on evocative 35mm film stock rather than Vfx-amenable digital. But the result – made on location in London, and souped up with Asian-metropolisstyle bustle and trappings – is something close to a child-appropriate Blade Runner, with atmosphere thick enough to drink.
It renders some of the investigative set pieces unexpectedly suspenseful, such as a delve through a sinister research facility where Tim and Pikachu are accompanied by aspiring reporter slash quasi-femme fatale Lucy (Kathryn Newton) and her highly strung Psyduck. And things keep getting eerier, particularly as all clues point towards Bill Nighy’s doddery industrialist, whose designs on the future aren’t a million miles from those of Noah Cross, Chinatown’s thundery, malevolent patriarch. I know, I know: in a Pokémon film? But the connection has to be intentional: Detective Pikachu is too playfully engaged with noir’s mechanisms for it to big up one of the genre’s (un) holiest texts by accident. Of course, it will sail over the heads of younger viewers, given a ready supply of antics, from a punchily staged Pokémon battle featuring a bad-tempered Charizard, to the lavish parade-based finale and Reynolds’s omnipresent motormouthed asides (which I found irritating, at most, only 20 per cent of the time). But our five- and four-yearold Poké-literate sons were sufficiently rattled by its creepier sections to have not been entirely sure what to make of it afterwards. With a week’s distance on the screening, they’re now considerably more enthusiastic: eight out of 10 and 10 out of 10 respectively, since you asked. This 37-year-old is on pretty much the same page. It’s by no means the Pokémon film anyone would have asked for, but it’s one I’m delighted exists.