I know less about Pokemon than I do open-heart surgery, and I would rather try to do a triple bypass than play with make-believe stuffed animals. I remember when the phone game Pokemon Go came out. Suddenly, smokers with neckbeards in trenchcoats emerged from their basements, blinking in the sunlight, stumbling to a sign in the park near me and being asocial in malodorous groups. I figured it was some sort of support group thing for unemployed people. Which is stupid. Unemployment is like drinking: best done alone. I don’t need support, I can fail to work all by myself.
Anyway, it the neighbor kid Carlos spent two hours explaining Pokemon to me while I babysat him. I get to do that sometimes when his mom gets stuck at work and the grandparents are made about something. The rule is that when I babysit I have to listen to the kid. When I’m not babysitting, he has to listen to me. That’s why I spend so much time with the kid, and why he knows more about Rusty Trombones, Cleveland Steamers and the Lincoln Wet Winks than any other kid in his class. He wanted to show me a box of cards with stuffed animals pictures on them. He said it was a game, like War, but with more rules than the library puts on its free computers, and you “Gotta Catch Them All.” Last time I heard anyone talk like that was the Harelip referring to strains of herpes. And she did.
Turns out, Pokemon is a big ass deal. There are the cards, but also video games, backpacks, T-shirts, fan fiction, some cartoon series for stoners, and hot chicks dressing like sexy furries at conventions full of virgins who otherwise stand in parks catching make believe stuffed animals with manmade scarcity. One of the video games this thing spawned is “Detective Pikachu,” named after a yellow dog-cat-mouse creature, the most marketable of the bunch.
Now, Pokemon has birthed a big-budget live-action movie where CGI versions of the stuffed animals interact with humans, all based on a video game called Detective Pikachu. I have no fucking clue if the game and movie have the same plot, or if the similarity ends with Pikachu wearing a deerstalker. Probably the next time I babysit Carlos, though, I’ll find out. What I do know is that the movie is trying pretty fucking hard to please two masters. It wants to be hip and ironic, a deconstruction of Pokemon for those with some sort of nostalgic soft spot for some shit they wasted money on as a kid, while also pleasing its hardcore fans, which we can safely assume are neckbeards and children.
Detective Pikachu is a mystery, but not really. I mean, not in the sense that anyone put the fucking effort to come up with an engaging or clever puzzle. it’s about as simple as an episode of Scooby Doo; the kind-seeming old man turns out to be the baddie all along. And the meanest-seeming guy turns out to be innocent.
Detective Pikachu also wants to be a comedy, but the gags are mostly the sort of self-referential bullshit gets laughed at by the people in on the joke, and only then as a way for them to let others know they are in on it. Well, there’s also a lot of jokes that have to do with stuffed animals having emotional outbursts. This might make some laugh, but it will also give horrific flashbacks to anyone who ever had a Teddy Ruxpin low on batteries.
In a city of very intentionally indeterminate nationality, a lonely young man named Tim (Justice Smith) learns that his estranged father, a detective, has been killed. When he goes to retrieve his father’s stuff, all sorts of feelings emerge. He thought he didn’t about his father, but, guess what! He really does. Turns out he’s been harboring hurt for the father that left him, and it’s stunted his growth the way all those Vienna Sausages did to my nephew Gomez the Midget.
Tim has been so stunted that he can’t connect with a Pokemon, which every citizen of the city is expeted to do. See, everyone is encouraged to have a stuffed animal sidekick by the benevolent city dictator (Bill Nighy). I guess the Pokemon sidekicks are like their pet, or therapy animal, or something. I don’t know, it sure as hell seems like brainwashed slavery to me. And yet, his dead father’s stuffed sidekick, a yellow cat-dog-mouse thing named Pikachu, starts talking to him. Unlike all the other Pokemon, this one can speak like a human, but only to the boy.
This gimmick puts Detective Pikachu on the same plane as every other movie where a person can secretly understand an animal, and it includes all the confused looks of people who think Tim is crazy. There is a shitload of movies with this device: can you think of a single one that’s any good? I sure as hell can’t because it’s a lazy-ass horseshit device that ran out the clock on Mr. Ed.
The Pikachu s voiced by Ryan Reynolds doing his patented smirky frat bro schtick. It’s supposed to feel clever and a little naughty, just like a Ruby Tuesday’s house cocktail with a double entendre name. In reality, it feels as corporate and watered down. What I got out of Reynolds Pikachu is a desire for him to shut the fuck up, or at least wait until he actually had something clever to say to open his mouth.
As expected, the kid’s dad did not die, he is living inside the Pikachu. Also, the seemingly benevolent benefactor of the city who encourages the pairing of man and monster is a dastardly villain out to impose his own vision of Utopia on everyone. His machinations and quest for control are what caused the accident to Tim’s father.
The movie explains its every move like a teenager with Instagram drinking his first beer. Part of the problem is that it wishes to appeal to a wide audience, but is about a bunch of stuffed animals only its fans know the details about. So, it goes about explaining them along with any associated mythology. The bigger problem, though, is that Detective Pikachu is a cold, soulless corporate venture, a synthetic structure made not to tell a story, but to sell shit. The idea of it being a mystery, or a very bad noir, is a ruse, a lazy stab at hipping it up with no effort or ingenuity to back up the idea.
It checks off boxes for fanboys and for kids who want toys, but it doesn’t feel for a minute like anyone believed in this story, thought it needed to be told, or had any original ideas. It’s a bad mystery with bad jokes, occasionally terrible CGI and lead actors who act as though they either don’t care or have no idea how to care. Maybe you have been craving a Scooby Doo story with a yellow cat-dog-mouse thing, or you’re loyal to a brand because you liked it way back when, long before you knew it was a bunch of crap. I don’t know. All I know is there ain’t nothing in Detective Pikachu for people wanting a good story, or even a mystery they can’t solve in the first five minutes. Two Fingers.