Review: Detective Pikachu

Pokemon - smallish monsters who like to fight, which is handy as having them fight has been the basis for a thirty year run of card and video games, as well as various animated series and a movie - have been around long enough that most people reading this would have at least some vague awareness of them. Fortunately, to get the most out of Detective Pikachu you're only required to find one particular Pokeman - that'd be Pikachu - cute. It's not a hard ask.

In a parallel world where humans and Pokemon have lived in harmony (well, apart from the fighting) for centuries, Tim Goodman (Justice Smith) doesn't care one bit about the adorable pocket monsters. Then he gets a call from Ryme City (a futuristic utopia where Pokemon and humans live side by side rather than the more traditional master-monster relationship) - his father Harry, a Ryme City detective, is missing presumed extremely dead.

Tim's lack of a Pokemon partner makes him unusual in Ryme City, but fortunately a solution is at hand when he finds his father's partner - a Pikachu wearing an adorable Sherlock Holmes hat - in his office. Even more surprisingly, Tim can understand him (he's voiced by Ryan Reynolds) and vice versa. Which means they can team up and try to solve what's going on with Tim's dead dad, which is a puzzle that turns out to be a lot more far-reaching than it first seemed.

As mysteries go this is pretty straightforward - what's the deal with the mysterious R gas that turns Pokemons violent? What part does Ryme City creator Howard Clifford (Bill Nigh) play? - but it plays fair with the audience rather than just pulling suspects and solutions out of thin air. It's all pretty strange on the surface, but at its heart it's a basic film noir, only with a cute electric furball as a co-lead and a bunch of fun monsters wandering around to fight and interrogate. As concepts go it's a pretty good one.

Renyolds fires off his usual snappy patter and there's the occasional deep cut Pokemon reference but this isn't so much a comedy as it is a solid adventure set in a very quirky but well-realised world. The special effects are consistently great - there's never any problem with accepting Pikachu as totally real - and Smith is surprisingly good as someone who isn't (but maybe is) messed up over the death (only there's no body) of his dad.

It certainly doesn't hurt to know a bit about Pokemon here and if you're a fan there's a lot to take in. But the in-joke stuff is almost entirely in the background; Detective Pikachu is basically your typical high-concept kids movie that's smart enough to keep adults firmly entertained as well. Pikachu is pretty adorable after all.

- Anthony Morris