The amount of hate mail I received from people that took offense to my review of the first Pokémon film was enough to choke a horse.  Here are two of my favorites:

"Maybe you lack confidence in your point of view and have to secure it by making jokes at the expense of the innocent, asshole.

"I hope that sometime during your worthless life that you experience a trauma so severe that it causes you to become an epileptic.

Can you believe it?  What kind of monster would write such horrible things to a guy who is just trying to make a living writing film reviews?  All I did was suggest that Pokémon might be a good thing for society because it has been known to give its viewers seizures and that our “herds” needed some “thinning.”  No big deal, right?  It’s not like I’m the one giving kids seizures.  So wipe the drool from the chins of your zombified children and send your hate mail to the people that make the stupid television show.

You’d think I’d launched a full-scale attack on an American classic from the volumes of responses I received.  It wasn’t Ben Hur, or Schindler’s List, or even Spaceballs.  We’re talking about Pokémon.  You could put 100 monkeys in a room with 100 typewriters and not get a concept as bad as Pokémon.  It shouldn’t be possible to make something this immediately unwatchable.  If your kids like Pokémon, there’s probably something really wrong with them.  Maybe you were too busy firing off e-mail to film critics while Junior was guzzling the Drano under the kitchen sink.

I’ve learned a few more things about Pokémon since the first film, like that each Pokémon can say nothing but its name.  This enabled me to figure out that the name of the thing I called Turtle-Pokémon is actually Squirtle.  I only mention this because we used the same name for the kid on our high school track team who had a perpetual wet spot that seeped through to the front of his sweat pants.

Like Pokémon: Mewtwo Strikes Back, the new film begins with an awful unaired episode of the television show called Pikachu’s Rescue Adventure.  Pikachu, if you remember, is the little yellow squeak-toy owned by Pokémon master Ash.  In short, Pikachu rescues the baby/star/egg Pokemon (just like in Mewtwo), as well as a cat hanging Wily E. Coyote-style on a branch on the side of a cliff.  There was supposed to be some kind of moral about accomplishing things through teamwork, but it gets kind of lost through the bad animation and stupid little noises that each creature makes.

Pokémon 2000 concerns an evil Pokémon master that is trying to collect three rare Pokemon in an attempt to unlock great treasures.  Ash and his friends also set off in search of the same uncommon Pokémon after crashing their boat into a remote island and having the natives mistake him for “the chosen one.”  I had my fingers crossed that Ash would end up on an island populated by flesh-eating head-hunters, or perhaps an overweight homosexual exhibitionist and a grumpy homophobic ex-Navy Seal, but things just didn’t pan out for me.

Pokémon 2000 is probably a little more visually pleasing than Mewtwo, just from a few scenes that offer computer-generated animation (all of which seemed way too similar to the video game “Myst”).    But you should not take that statement as a ringing endorsement, or even as a suggestion that you take your sticky little brats to see it.  Scary Movie is a better family film.

On a humorous note, the translation of the Japanese title of Pokémon 2000 (Poketto monsutaa: Maboroshi no Pokemon X: Lugia bakudan) is The Phantom Pokemon: Lugia's Explosive Birth.  Now that’s entertainment.

1:08 –