Pokémon Detective Pikachu (2019)

Seven-year-old me would have lost his mind at the very idea of this film. A live-action Pokémon world, Pikachu actually talking, Ryme City glowing neon in the rain with Bulbasaurs wandering the parks and a Mr. Mime doing an invisible wall gag. On paper, Pokémon Detective Pikachu is everything a kid raised on the games and the anime could want. In practice, it's a film that gets so many small things right and one enormous thing very, very wrong.

Let's start with what works, because it genuinely does work in places. Pikachu himself is a triumph of creature design. He's fuzzy, he's expressive, his little face sells every joke and every moment of warmth. The wider creature work is lovingly faithful too. Seeing Psyduck waddling about with his permanent migraine, or a Charizard looming in a darkened arena, gave me a proper jolt of childhood recognition. Ryme City is a genuinely lovely bit of world-building, a rain-slicked, neon-lit metropolis where humans and Pokémon coexist as partners rather than competitors. Visually, the film earns its budget.

But then there's Ryan Reynolds. I like Reynolds. I've enjoyed him plenty, not least in Deadpool & Wolverine. The problem is that his snarky, fast-talking, fourth-wall-adjacent energy is his energy, and it doesn't really feel like Pikachu's. Pikachu, in the games and the show, is gentle, loyal, a little stubborn. Reynolds plays a caffeinated wise-cracker who happens to be yellow. It's not offensive, it's just... off. Like casting someone with perfect comic timing in entirely the wrong role. He gets laughs, but they're Reynolds laughs, not Pikachu laughs.

The bigger frustration, though, is the story itself. What we've got is a noir-lite mystery: corporate conspiracies, memory loss, a human journalist (Justice Smith) trying to find his missing father, with Pikachu as his reluctant partner in investigation. It's perfectly serviceable as a generic sci-fi thriller. The problem is that it barely needs to be a Pokémon film at all. Strip out the creature designs and the Easter eggs and you'd have a fairly unremarkable genre piece that any studio could have made with any IP slapped on top.

There's no gym challenge. No catching wild Pokémon. No sense of journey or discovery. No real exploration of what the bond between a trainer and their partner actually means. Those things, the adventure, the growth, the feeling that the world is wide open and waiting, are what make Pokémon Pokémon. This film sidelines all of that in favour of amnesia subplots and boardroom villainy. It's like making a film set in the world of football and never actually having anyone play a match.

And that's genuinely baffling given how much effort clearly went into everything else. The production clearly cared about the aesthetics, about honouring the visual language of the franchise. But aesthetics without soul only goes so far. I kept waiting for the film to lean into what makes these creatures and this world genuinely moving, and it kept pivoting back to its corporate conspiracy plot instead.

It's not a bad film. I want to be fair about that. It's slick, it's occasionally fun, and there are sequences that genuinely sparkle. But it's a missed opportunity of the highest order, a film that had everything it needed to be something special and settled for being something fine. Seven-year-old me would have been thrilled by the trailer, gone opening weekend, and then spent the car ride home asking why Ash wasn't in it and why nobody was trying to catch anything.

Two and a half stars. Pretty to look at, pleasant enough to sit through, and almost completely disconnected from the thing that made you want to watch it in the first place.

Rating: ★★½  | Year: 2019  | Watched: 2026-03-04

View on Letterboxd →

Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US

Affiliate disclosure: Movies With Macca may earn a small commission on purchases or subscriptions started via these links. It costs you nothing extra.

Related on Movies With Macca

More from Rob Letterman: Shark Tale (2004)
More with Ryan Reynolds: Life (2017) · Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)
More from Japan: Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025) · Blue (1993) · The Ghost of Yotsuya (1959)
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
More action: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · The General (1926) · Hand of Death (1976) · Daredevil (2003)
More adventure: Alice in Wonderland (1951) · The Eagle (1925) · Louisiana Story (1948) · The General (1926)