In “Pokémon Detective Pikachu,” billed as the “first-ever live-action Pokémon adventure,” detective Harry Goodman goes mysteriously missing, prompting his 21-year-old son Tim (Justice Smith) to investigate. He’s helped by his dad’s former Pokémon partner, Detective Pikachu (Ryan Reynolds from “Deadpool”). Wonderland sent our intrepid 6-year-old and 10-year-old critics (and their Mom) to check it out. Spoilers ahead!
6-year-old: It starts with a car crash.
10-year-old: The last Pikachu finds this guy [Tim] whose father died and that Pikachu turned out to be his partner.
Mom: His dad was a police detective who died in a car crash. Or did he really?
6: Actually, his dad did not die in a car crash. Remember the end.
Mom: I remember. That’s the question in the whole movie: Is his dad really dead or what happened? Tim befriends an intrepid reporter who knows there’s a story here and tries to uncover the truth. The humans are live-action and the Pokémon are animated.
10: So they go out and they work together and try to stop this evil guy from turning the entire city into Pokémon. They captured a Mewtwo. They used the Mewtwo to get a substance they called R. It would make Pokémon go wild kind of and they would attack everything and everybody.
Mom: It would make their eyes turn purple and they’d freak out and start acting crazy.
6: Danger. Super scary. Do not watch. It makes all the Pokémon killer and they invented it by making Mewtwo.
10: Kind of.
6: It’s a super strong Pokémon and I haven’t got straight how they made it from a fossil. Because first I thought they made it from Mewtwo. Because how could you get DNA from a fossil?!?
Mom: It’s a city where people and Pokémon live together. Usually they’re wild and people enslave them.
6: Actually, they don’t really get slaved or captured. They just, like, it’s hard to explain.
Mom: Was it scary after the first part with the gas?
6: It was okay. You can just call it [the gas] R.
10: And then they go to the guy’s evil place and they find they were doing experiments on Pokémon. One was to increase the power of the Pokémon, it would make them stronger. And another one made them big, as big as a mountain. Well, technically they had the mountain on their back. Then they fall off one and then they fall into a river. Pikachu gets hurt. Mewtwo helps them even though they thought Mewtwo killed his father at the start. Pikachu thinks that kid is better off without him so he walks away.
Mom: Pikachu thinks he sold him to Mewtwo, he betrayed him to Mewtwo, and Mewtwo was the villain.
10: He thinks he’s better off without him and the kid gets captured. Then it flashes to a scene when Pikachu is sadly singing the Pokémon theme song and I thought that was just comedy.
6: The weird thing was they’re not supposed to have Pokémon battle, but there was a Pokémon battle. Mewtwo for some reason…
Mom: No, it was Mega Charizard.
10: Not it isn’t Mega Charizard. It’s Charizard.
6: Remember when Pikachu was fighting Mewtwo.
Mom: I remember when they were fighting, but that was just because Mewtwo was taken over by a super villain mastermind. The number of villains was confusing.
6: Tim, he was trying to figure out what happened to his dad once he found Pikachu.
Mom: Pikachu had amnesia and also Pikachew speaks English, which was very unusual, but only Tim could understand him. It was a temporary condition.
6: He tried to find Metwo. He asked Mewtwo to save Pikachu because Pikachu was into water and electricity.
Mom: I thought he got hit in the head with a rock when the mounains were moving. He got into electric water when he wasn’t supposed to?
6: Yeah.
Wonderland: Did Mewtwo heal Pikachu?
6: The first time it looked like Mewtwo was the villain, but Mewtwo wasn’t actually the villain. It was four other Pokémon. I accuse four other Pokémon. … Mewtwo was basically following behind the car because some Pokémon were going to attack. So it needed to save the dad and Pikachu. These kind of frog Pokémon were chasing the car and Mewtwo was following behind.
10: The frog Pokémon were Greninja.
6: I’m not telling you any of the weird parts. Because I don’t want to. … One more thing: Spoiler alert. Because basically you’re spoiling the movie by telling it to everyone.
10: I would give that “Detective Pikachu” movie four stars because it really was pretty cool and the graphics were amazing. But I really was expecting more.
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