You must not catch it

Yes Monsters Inc. took place inside Blade runner, it might look a bit like Detective Pikachu. The film is set in a high-tech, neon-lit hypermarket world populated by magical creatures called Pokémon. The production and design of the characters, inspired by decades of Pokémon Cards, video games and cartoons are beautiful. You will not find a more striking children's movie this year.

You will almost certainly find one more entertaining. Detective Pikachu is an amazing setting surrounding the repetition of a story. The mystery, the characters and the comedy (or especially the lack of comedy) are all forgettable. Yet the imaginative city in which they exist is never fun to watch.

The metropolis is called Ryme City, designed by an inventor named Howard Clifford (Bill Nighy, a real casting choice of galaxies and brains). The city of Ryme was built to allow men and Pokémon to live together in harmony, unlike the typical relationship between these species, which is more like something of the world of underground fighting, with underground "coaches" who capture these creatures in nature. and then pit them against each other in combat.

Tim Goodman (Judge Smith) arrives in Ryme City looking for answers. His ex-father died, apparently in a car accident, but the incident makes no sense. After the clues, Tim meets Pikachu, his father. Normally, Pokémon can not speak except to say their own name. So, the fact that Tim understands Pikachu – his voice is provided by Ryan Reynoldsat least when he does not squeak "Pika! Pika! "- is an even bigger puzzle to solve.

Pikachu itself is an amazing special effect. He looks as cute and cuddly as one Pokémon cartoon and strangely real all at once. His fur is tangled when wet and dirty when he rolls in the ground. He is so involved in what is happening around him on the screen that the audience may not even understand how difficult the illusion must have been. If you see Detective Pikachu, It's really worth the effort watching him; how Pikachu moves in space and interacts with the elements on the screen. It's amazing. (Detective Pikachu John Mathieson, filmmaker, frequent contributor to Ridley Scott's, director of photography at gladiator and Kingdom of Paradise, with the dark beautiful Logan.)

Frustration, the obvious imagination in every beautiful background of Ryme City is rarely matched in the foreground. Tim and Pikachu discover that the accident that killed his father was not an accident and that he was linked to a case on which the father, a policeman, was investigating, involving a flock of Pokémon misbehaving. The idea of ​​a little fuzzy detective who pulls electricity from his buttocks by associating with this sad young man to explore a utopian city where grumpy magical dogs act like cops ringing like a truly surreal experience. In practice, the bland quest of mismatched partners – attributed to five different credited authors, including Derek Connolly and the director Rob Letterman – feels like the sterilized cut of the much stranger thing that it was designed to be.

Ryan Reynolds interprets Pikachu as a sort of PG rated Deadpool that fails forever, even though he develops a sweet relationship with Judge Smith as Tim. The inherent absurdity of appealing to serious actors such as Bill Nighy and Ken Watanabe (who plays Tim's father's boss at RCPD) is a good laugh when they first show up, but all you need is so far without solid data. Once again, it's hard for any human being to compete with Mr. Mime, a Pokémon who does exactly what his name implies and who is subjected to a cute cop / bad cop interrogation. Detective PikachuThe best scene.

The obvious comparison for Detective Pikachu is Who wants the skin of Roger Rabbit, another black comedy-spoofing on a human and a cartoon character who team up clumsily to defeat a big plot that threatens the very fabric of their society. Both films work well as eye candy stuffed with advanced special effects. But Roger Rabbit also touted a satisfying mystery, not to mention satire and sharp social commentary on southern California and the film industry. Under predictable history, Detective Pikachu It's not much, and if you need Wikipedia to explain who Mewtwo is, most jokes will cross your head. Everything is a little too childish for adults and a little too complicated for children. He absolutely deserves an Oscar nomination for the best visual effects, even though the subject suggests to me that he is unlikely to receive one.

Additional thoughts:

-If you're wondering about my own Pokecredentials: I know all the classic characters of my day who were selling Pokemon cards to kids at a comic book store in the late 90s and early 2000s. I was a child drug dealer. I'm not proud of that.

-There is a very curious theme that runs through Detective Pikachu on adults so obsessed with Pokémon that they become terrible and careless parents. I do not know what to do with it. But it's there.

One could argue that the best way to watch this movie is to make it the first half of a double Under the lake of money.