Poké­mon run Pok-amok in the new Detec­tive Pikachu trailer

You may think you know Pikachu, de fac­to mas­cot of the col­lectible trad­ing card game fran­chise Poké­mon. Lit­tle yel­low mouse, spiky tail, shoots light­ning, right? Think again.

For the Pikachu that appears in the new­ly released trail­er for Detec­tive Pikachu is no ordi­nary Pikachu. He is a detec­tive, and at that, no ordi­nary detec­tive. He’s Detec­tive Pikachu.

Unique among Poké­mon for his abil­i­ty to speak Eng­lish (in the vel­vety tones of Ryan Reynolds) and work as a detec­tive, unique among detec­tives for being an elec­tric rodent, Detec­tive Pikachu is the first in a new breed of movie hero. He’s the only one who can walk in both worlds, like Blade. Except that instead of being torn between the realms of the human and vam­pire, he’s torn between the realms of the detec­tives and his fel­low Pikachus.

Once the trail­er has suf­fi­cient­ly estab­lished the foun­da­tion of its premise – that Pikachu has found gain­ful employ as a detec­tive — the clip sends him into a vast con­spir­a­cy cov­er­ing the Poké-metrop­o­lis of Ryme City. He finds a side­kick in Tim Good­man (Jus­tice Smith), a boy search­ing for his lost father, and an ene­my in the nefar­i­ous, genet­i­cal­ly engi­neered Mewtwo.

But of course the heart of Detec­tive Pikachu must remain the sub­tle art of detec­tion. Detec­tive Pikachu car­ries him­self like a clas­sic noir gumshoe, from the inter­nal mono­logue voiceover to his predilec­tion for a hot cup o’ joe.

The result looks some­thing like Chi­na­town by way of Satoshi Tajiri, a labyrinthine mys­tery bustling with super­pow­ered crit­ters. But of all the uncan­ny-val­ley-plumb­ing fau­na on dis­play in the trail­er, only one of them can save the day using a com­bi­na­tion of deduc­tive rea­son­ing and tar­get­ed shocks. There is only one Detec­tive Pikachu.

Detec­tive Pikachu comes to the­aters in the US and UK on 10 May.