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| Courtesy of Warner Bros. |
Friedrich Nietzsche once said, “It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.” Toward that end, I'm thrilled to welcome film critic Jason Evans to the Flixchat team, where he'll challenge himself to give readers an idea of whether a movie is good or bad in 100 words. He gives a short, spoiler-free synopsis of the film and then presents his review of the film in exactly 100 words (not 99, not 101).
With that explanation out of the way, let's see if he pulls it off! Here is his 100-word review of Pokemon: Detective Pikachu.
The premise: Pokemon: Detective Pikachu is a live-action film based on a popular video game, that became a popular anime TV show, that became a popular toy card game, that became a kind-of-popular animated movie series… and so on and so on. Bottom line, Pokemon is one of the biggest media franchises on Earth, still going strong 20+ years after the first video game was launched.
But it had not really gotten into live-action, mainstream movies until now. This big budget ($150 million) film stars Justice Smith (from Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom) as Tim, the son of Harry Goodman. Harry is a police detective who works in Ryme City, a place where humans and animated pets with superpowers called Pokemon live in harmony. When Harry dies in an accident, Tim tries to figure out what happened with the help of Harry’s Pokemon, Pikachu (voiced by Deadpool’s Ryan Reynolds). For some reason that is never explained or even explored, Tim and Pikachu actually understand each other, which makes their relationship different from all the other human-Pokemon interactions.
It is worth noting that I am not a fan of the Pokemon franchise of media products. I am somewhat familiar with it as my kids played the video and card games, but I am not someone who knows much more than very sketchy basics of what Pokemon is all about.
The 100 words: Who is this film for? The story is so obvious and vapid that it feels aimed at 6 year olds, but the jokes are clearly designed for young adults. The main premise of humans living with Pokemon never works because the Pokemon don’t do anything except put the humans in danger. The tone shifts jarringly several times and the pacing is surprisingly dull. Reynolds' charisma and humor saves it from being a total disaster, but he can’t go R-rated and many of the jokes fall flat. Unless you are a die-hard fan, you will be confused and bored. Stay away!
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