I wonder if this was green-lit when the Pokémon Go! phenomenon struck the globe. 🤔

The intro killed the momentum, and I can’t tell if it was the screenwriting or the acting, but I couldn’t wait for Pikachu, voiced by Ryan Reynolds, to show up. Some of the writing was CRINGE!!! I hit the watch-check 30 minutes in.

Casting Ryan Reynolds in a comedy is kinda like adding that Seth Rogen-spice to your film: you know what you’re gonna get so your expectations are already pretty leveled, and their performance either exceeds those expectations or it doesn’t. Reynolds carried this film as Pikachu, and I’m grateful to him for that.

Felt like the screenplay was written 18 years ago and only marginally updated for a 2019 audience.  Eleven-year old Pistachio would’ve loved this film, and I wondered if this would have been one of those films I thought was perfect as an adolescent [like I thought for “Batman and Robin” (1997), “Daredevil” (2003) and “The Fantastic Four” (2005)] then saw again as an adult and cringed for like a week.

The Pokémon characters looked great against human actors, but there seemed to be some inconsistency in the reaction times of the actors coordinated with the SFX of the Pokémon. Sometimes the actors seemed natural around them, and other times it felt like they were overacting with inanimate objects. Tricky, tricky.

🤴🏽Justice Smith keeps on getting jobs, bruh! I ain’t mad at it. Shouts to his agent for securing that contact with Legendary Entertainment (“Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom” co-starred Smith and was produced by Legendary Entertainment also).

My biggest problem was definitely the inconsistent sound changes, specifically the film’s sound mixing. Explosions that should’ve been annoyingly loud were not, and other moments when multiple characters (human actors + Pokémon) interacted together it sounded dulled down a tad.

Lastly, the resolution for this film’s conflict was almost immediately obvious after the climax.