Detective Pikachu is a movie made by Legendary Movies and The Pokemon company, loosely based on the video game of the same name, on the Nintendo 3DS. The movie stars Ryan Reynolds and Justice Smith and tells the story of an amnesiac Pikachu and Tim Goodman searching for Tim's dad and Pikachu's partner. An interesting point of Pikachu's character is that he can communicate via full sentences with Tim alone, for reasons that we cannot disclose because it will spoil the movie!  This movie is a change for Pokemon movies, previously only 2D animated and featuring Ash Ketchum and company (save for the Mewtwo Strikes Back remake).  This movie is a first, featuring live actors and Pokemon rendered in CGI, and while the CGI designs are impressive, and character development is strong, the movie falls in quality mainly due to pacing issues.

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Detective Pikachu features some amazing characters throughout the movie, especially that of Detective Pikachu himself (the character). Ryan Reynolds nails the personality to create a humorous character like Detective Pikachu, while simultaneously giving us a character we can sympathize with and feel sorry for when we need to. Smith also aces Tim in the emotional sense. From the beginning, we see and understand his struggle and we feel for him. The Pokemon featured also stay true to the personalities given in the video games and anime, even down to a surprise character that, again we will not spoil.

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One very major drawback of this movie is its pacing. The story of the movie itself is a great tale, but unfortunately, many of the events of the movie go by way too fast. It feels crammed and like some parts can easily be omitted. This holds especially true at the beginning of the movie, as events take place at a faster rate than you might expect and does not give time for viewers to be able to fully take in a scene. Some scenes that may have been created to make viewers feel emotional may also fail to do so due to this pacing issue. 

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Detective Pikachu is actually a great movie for one based off of a video game. It is unfortunate that pacing might make some viewers unable to fully take in the story and get into the emotion of it, but the story itself and the cast of characters present can make up for it by just enough. We give it a 7.1/10 and hope that future movies based off of the franchise can improve upon what was created.

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CHECK OUT A TRAILER FOR DETECTIVE PIKACHU BELOW!