Pokémon may be one of the biggest multi-media franchises ever, having featured in video games, card games, comics and cartoons by the lorryload since 1996. But if you haven’t consumed any of those, the whole enterprise is pretty much unfathomable. After all, you don’t have to have read a Batman comic to follow the concept of a masked-man beating up bank robbers. Pokémon, on the other hand... well, it’s set in an alternate reality in which people go around stalking big-eyed, super-powered monsters, trapping them inside metal orbs like high-tech genies and then releasing these monsters so that they can have gladiatorial battles with each other. It isn’t clear what the monsters get out of this violent slavery, and the first live-action Pokémon film, Pokémon Detective Pikachu, doesn’t make things much clearer. If anything, viewers who aren’t already familiar with the franchise will stumble out of the cinema even more puzzled than when they went in.

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The film’s young hero is Tim (Justice Smith), a prickly small-town insurance agent who hears that his estranged father, a police detective, has been killed in a car accident. The bereavement requires Tim to “wrap things up” in some vague way, which means catching the train to Ryme City, a futuristic megalopolis (actually London’s financial district, with some digital gussying up) where humans and their Pokémon pals live together in peace and harmony. Indeed, some humans have a symbiotic link with particular Pokémon, much like the people and their daemons in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials novels. Harry’s former boss (Ken Watanabe), for instance, shares his office with a grumpy demonic bulldog, which, like the rest of the Pokémon, is a CGI creation slotted into a live-action setting. Other Pokémon appear to be more or less as intelligent as humans, which raises some troubling questions about their civil rights. But these questions, like every question you might have about the Poké-verse, are left unanswered.