Bringing Pokemon into live action (or… actors and photorealistic-ish CGI) after twenty-odd years of games, anime and manga means, in this case, taking a lot of the characteristics of them while imposing a whole new plot onto things. Abandoning the game and anime recurring plotline of sending a pre-teen child out into the world to capture creatures and have them fight for him, instead this is the story of an insurance agent brought to the big city by the death of his father, only to discover there are sinister circumstances behind his father’s death and only one Pokemon with a deer-stalker hat can help him (hint, he’s in the title).
This is a weird combination of inventive world building and uninventive plotting. The mixture of the two means that this is a movie that has a lot of great eye-candy, but the story never really takes us anywhere very far – none of the actors have very much to play and, while they interact with the various Pokemon in ways that show off the individually entertaining aspects of the creatures, there isn’t a lot beyond that. It’s mildly diverting during the running time, and it’s never exactly dull (there’s always another creature just around the corner), but it does feel a tad pedestrian.
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