>>38521239Besides that, i also feel like the movie suffers a lot from 3rd wheel syndrome thanks to Lucy. Scratch that. Now that i think about it, the main cast is pretty bland as a whole and Ryanchu pretty much carries the whole movie on his shoulders. Justice is honestly a pretty lousy actor and his emotional parts are often hard to buy, but he has a couple of shining moments. The movie is clearly a buddy film that focuses on the relationship between Pika and Tim. This makes Lucy feel tacked on. She's extremely generic in dialog and performance and feels almost unnecesary, as if the only thing she's good for is getting molested by Greninja tongues. I also believe the movie had quite a bit of fluff despite the near ADHD pacing it had. It's in this weird position where it could've benefited from a ~120 minute runtime, but it ironically has serious padding issues despite being ~90 mins long. The first act is fantastic and sets up the pokemon world wonderfully, but in my opinion goes through a bit of a lull in the 2nd act right after the Mr. Mime interrogation scene with some moments that aren't as compelling as they should be, at least right up until
the aforementioned lab scenes that culminate with the Giant Torterra sequence which was amazing to behold for me. But even then, i'd say big chunks of the 2nd and 3rd acts feel unnecesary to the plot, which isn't particularly heady in the first place.
Speaking of the 3rd act, it genuinely does get pretty wacky. Most of my theater was audibly enjoying the movie until
Bill Nighy's masterplan was revealed, awkward human dittos out of nowhere and there were a couple of loud " what the fuck?"s coming from the audience. Fortunately the awkwardness kinda settled down and the last 15 minutes were enjoyable. (Cont. in next post)
