<p>It&rsquo;s got an adorable hero from an iconic media brand who is voiced by a proven box office master at snark. But, somehow, &ldquo;Pok&eacute;mon Detective Pikachu&rdquo; never really gets arresting.</p>

- 

A neutered Ryan Reynolds tries hard but can’t make this live action-meets-animated movie gel. It’s plodding and listless and really not funny or smart enough. Turns out, you can’t copy “Deadpool” tricks for the PG set. “Pokémon Detective Pikachu ” borrows lightly from film noir crime dramas to create a mystery in a world where humans and Pokémon co-exist.

A young man called Tim Goodman (the terrific Justice Smith) joins with Pikachu (Reynolds’ voice) to search for what happened to the man’s father, a missing detective. The movie’s best moments are those between the scenes, where the Japan-born creatures thrillingly share the same urban space as humans.

Smith is very appealing as a son coming to grips with the loss of his estranged father, but Reynolds, as a cute coffee-guzzling detective with a Sherlock Holmes’ deerstalker cap, pingpongs from heartfelt to caustic uneasily and tries to mimic his best-known, fourth-wall breaking “Deadpool” movie character (“That’s a twist. Very twisty,” he says of one plot point.) It’s the most mismatched buddy flick since Will Smith teamed up with an Orc for “Bright.”

style="max-width:100%;height:auto;">

The film starts slowly, builds to a sort of plateau and then ends with the final third consisting of nonstop action sequences and an underwhelming conclusion. Ken Watanabe is underused as a police chi