First thing I want to do is just register my disdain, this movie has no right being as good as it is, NO RIGHT!

It certainly has no right to be the best movie I’ve seen so far this year. I mean, I’m as surprised as anyone. I honestly wasn’t expecting much from this movie, it’s probably good that my expectations were so low and that the last movie I watched was captain marvel which almost made me stop believing there would ever be a good movie again.

I mean captain marvel was barely a movie, it was just a really fast slide show of stuff happening with splosions. And Shazam wasn’t much better.

So how does a movie about a talking yellow electric rat make them both look like garbage in comparison, how is that even possible? Also goes without saying this is better than deadpool 2 hands down. This is probably the best Ryan Reynolds movie I’ve ever seen.

It’s simple, it was an actual movie. It wasn’t political, it wasn’t a spectacle comic book movie, it was just a movie. It had a basic three act structure giving equal weight to be beginning the all important middle I rant about and the end. It wasn’t like shazam that had this bloated first and third act with no middle, it was just all ass and titties, you need some waist in the middle otherwise you’re just a blob of flesh.

You need some time in the middle where we get to know the characters and they go on a journey, if you just have a big opening and no middle we don’t care about the end.

I literally can’t think of a flaw with this movie. It looked great, the characters were great, the story was great, the acting was great. It has heart and real emotion, the emotional scenes felt real and believable and not heavy and tacked on. I genuinely cared about the characters and it nailed the tone right out of the gate. I think tone for a movie like this is really important. They could’ve gone super cartoony and silly or taken themselves too seriously. It could’ve been another dragonball or death note movie fiasco. But it nails it in the first scene. The characters are fun but they do a perfect job of making you believe this is just the regular world with pokemon.

That could’ve made or broken the movie, because if you can’t buy the idea pokemon exist or it’s done in a stupid way it just breaks the immersion and becomes cheesey. The director of this movie just gets it, he perfected the tone. We have fun and humor but we also have the emotional resonance that carries the plot.

Now the plot is nothing special, it’s sort of a hollywood plot. Guy is trying to investigate his father’s death and then mysteries happen. And I want to say the ending was predictable but it was good predictable, it was satisfying. It didn’t subvert my expectation into a pile of shit like last jedi. But it also did subvert my expectations a little bit but I saw some of the twists coming, but there were twists, more than one in a movie about pokemon.

I almost didn’t think movies like this could be made today, movies that actually feel like movies, that have that structure. It’s like film makers don’t know how to make movies anymore and they just copy everyone else around them. So maybe if this movie came out ten or twenty years ago no one would’ve cared but the sheer fact the standard for movies is lower and some brainless comic book movie can make millions and get a fresh on rotten tomatoes a movie as competent and entertaining as this is an instant classic.

What more can I say, I was entertained from beginning to end, I enjoyed every part of it. It’s my film of the year so far. Go watch this movie.