'Pokémon: Detective Pikachu' stars Ryan Reynolds as a rodent — and it’s super effective

While I wouldn’t exactly call myself a Pokémon fan, I do have a sort of love/hate relationship with the franchise.

I first got into Pokémon when its popularity exploded in the late ‘90s. I didn’t have a Game Boy, but I watched the show religiously (and memorized the PokéRap!) every Friday night on GMA-7. I bought way more Pokémon cards and stickers than a boy with my meager allowance should have.

I left Pikachu for Peter Parker when the first Spider-Man film hit the silver screen, but fulfilled my childhood desire to play the game when a college friend lent me his Game Boy Advance.

After finishing all the color games between Pokémon Red and Pokémon Fire Red, I lost interest again. Pokémon Go pulled me back in after a decade, but it’s been almost a year, I think, since I stopped playing.

Detective Pikachu was one game I didn't get into. A quick Google search tells me that it’s a mystery-adventure spin-off, probably in the same vein as the Ace Attorney games. All I know about it is that it stars Pikachu in a deerstalker hat.

Don’t worry, though: You don’t need to know anything about the game to appreciate the film based on it. As far as the plot goes, Detective Pikachu is pretty straightforward: the titular character and his reluctant human companion uncover a sinister plot that forces them to work together to save the day.

Admittedly, Hollywood doesn’t exactly have the most spotless track record when it comes to video game adaptations. That’s why it’s a bit shocking (pun intended) that Detective Pikachu’s actually good.

Without going into spoiler territory: this film respects your intelligence enough to prevent you from regretting the fact that you watched it with your kids or younger siblings. There’s just enough story in this film to justify its 1 hour and 44 minutes of runtime, and it succeeds in handling a few mature themes quite deftly.

Ryan Reynolds portrays Pikachu with the same irreverent, eccentric raucousness he demonstrated in his memorable take on the Marvel anti-hero Deadpool.

Unsurprisingly, combining these two pop culture icons causes sparks to fly, in the best ways possible. Detective Pikachu squeezes the actor’s signature sardonic voice into a chipmunk-sized, coffee-guzzling cartoon character—and the resulting absurdity, sold by Reynolds’s comedic earnestness and the wonderful rapport between him and co-star Justice Smith, makes the film immensely entertaining.

Let’s not lie to ourselves, though: The real reason anyone would see this film is the rather novel prospect of watching living, breathing Pokémon interacting with ordinary people in a busy city.

The world of Detective Pikachu is lush and breathtaking. From crowded streets to secret laboratories, the locations are exactly how you would imagine they’d look like in the Pokémon universe, if you had the ability to just take a train (or pull a hidden lever behind a poster in a casino) and visit them.

Plus, the CGI Pokémon don’t just look realistic; they’re quite convincing in the way they move and act. Groups of monkey-like Aipom climb pipes and leap from great heights with minimal effort, while Growlithe walk with their partners exactly like how companion dogs would. Thus, the incorporation of these fictional creatures into real-world society isn’t as jarring as it seems on paper.

Interestingly enough, aside from all the cameos of different Pokémon across the countless generations of games, there are very few elements in Detective Pikachu that hearken back to the original games.

Most of the things I loved about the franchise—the rock-paper-scissors battle system, the collecting aspects, and even the gym battles—are nowhere to be found here.

In fact, one can make the argument that this isn’t so much a Pokémon movie as it is a movie that just happens to have Pokémon in it. Perhaps that’s why it works so well as a live-action film; after all, there are over a dozen animated movies you can watch if you’re craving a feature-length dose of Pikachu and company.

Ultimately, Detective Pikachu stands out as a rare example of a video game movie that actually knows what it’s doing and what it wants to be. Fully charged with humor and heart, the small, sunflower-colored sleuth successfully delivers a critical hit. — LA, GMA News 

Detective Pikachu hits Philippine cinemas on Thursday, May 9.