Detective Pikachu film review: This is how you adapt a video game for theaters

Enlarge / How do you know it’s Detective Pikachu, not just standard Pikachu? Clues: the hat, the magnifying glass, the lush fur. (credit: Warner Bros. / The Pokemon Company)

Pokémon: Detective Pikachu is the best video game adaptation I’ve ever seen in a theater. And it’s even better than that weak praise might imply.

We could spend this entire article regretting the existence of Uwe Boll or arguing the merits of the Tomb Raider and Resident Evil film series, but Detective Pikachu is such a fun, polished film that those comparison points really don’t make sense. The more important comparison point is Pokémon itself—and the many feature-length cartoons that it has already been attached to.

Detective Pikachu is brisk, whimsical, and family-friendly, but it particularly wins out—and survives its pitfalls—by doing something really surprising: fully breaking from the Pokémon game-plot paradigm.