Pokémon Detective Pikachu (2019)

There is a scene in the John Updike novel Toward the End of Time where the main character is babysitting his grandchildren for a night, they watch some kind of Japanese cartoon and he later comments that while he couldn't make heads or tales of it the kids sure seemed to enjoy it. I felt something of this hesitation going into Pokémon Detective Pikachu as Pokémon arrived after the time when I would have been its target audience. While there is certainly some 'inside baseball' elements to the film which I'm sure would make much more sense given a better familiarity with the material, things are 'dumbed down' and explained enough that the film is comprehensible to the Pokémon lay person. I suspect this is mostly because the film seems principally meant as a vehicle for Ryan Reynolds to do a PG version of his Deadpool shtick as a Pikachu who miraculously can be understood by the son of his former trainer (Justin Smith). Pikachu and Smith teem with Kathryn Newton to investigate the disappearance of Smith's father and a mysterious gas that can turn domesticated Pokémon violent. A little smarter then you might expect, the cast which also includes Ken Watanabe and Bill Nighy is uniformly good, as is the sense of world building, which makes the film work rather better then I had expected. A pleasant enough offering though hard to fit into any neat genera category. **1/2