"Sonic the Hedgehog" review

Yay, Hollywood unscrewed what they screwed up to begin with... and left everything else untouched.








A small town cop with dreams of a bigger career has his whole life thrown into chaos when an alien attracts government attention onto him, forcing himself and the alien to go on a whacky road trip across the country to fetch the alien's travelling devices but along the way, they just might discover that they need each other more than they think.

Would you ever believe that's the "plot" to something called "Sonic the Hedgehog?"

Based on the Sega platformer video game mascot franchise of the same name and stemming from an abomination of a trailer released roughly 9 months ago, "Sonic the Hedgehog" has managed to build up a substantial amount of buzz by accounting for audience feedback from the first trailer, delaying a potentially lucrative holiday season release plan, and redesigning its titular fastest thing alive from the ground up into something far more pleasant on the eyes.

I can only imagine then, that had they not done so, the general reception of audiences would be holding this thing closer to the "Super Mario Bros." film in terms of quality, except that "Super Mario Bros." at least went so bafflingly wrong that it's at least perversely fascinating to watch unfold.

"Sonic the Hedgehog" opts for something that I've grown to slowly hate more in the modern era of cinema than the outright bad ; bland, soulless, cookiecutter, and boring to the extreme of being flat out lame.

As a franchise, "Sonic the Hedgehog '' has been so abstractly defined and erratically shifting that I can't even harp on the decision in and of itself to bring him into the real world. It's a series that has been reinvented from what it was loosely defined as from the start that there's not a lot that you can't technically do with it.

A live action take set in our world is weird but not conceptually impossible. What I do fault the filmmakers for is doing "homework" that clearly amounts to glancing at a wiki article for 5 minutes, watching 10 minutes of gameplay for the first game's first stage, and then slapping a loose visual coating over someone's first draft of an unused Sony "Smurfs" script from 10 years ago.

James Marsden turns in a journeyman performance that's probably better than the material he's given but not particularly high praise for a script falling back on the whole "why move out of ambition when you have everything you need in the small town you wanna grow out of" cliche.

Jim Carrey is back in full effect as a 90s parody of himself as Dr. Robotnik that's too erratic to buy as a character and too ineffective to do more than remind you of better Jim Carrey comedies that you could be watching.

The oddest failure however, is Ben Schwartz's Sonic, who's speedy, ADHD-addled quirks are pressed to the forefront of the character for the sake of whatever piece of flat humor or blase spectacle that they can push, making him feel flatter than fully conceived and more annoying than endearing. I say oddest failure because I can't quite pinpoint how much of this is the fault of his own performance when he does manage to fit in some heart wherever he gets the chance despite lacking any grasp of the character as defined through any given pre-existing iterations in video games, cartoons or comic books or if the script is really just that bad. Maybe a little bit of both.

Harsh as all of this may sound,"Sonic the Hedgehog '' isn't a terrible movie. It was clearly made for the kids in mind and on the sheer level of being a disposable family picture, kids will probably love it and parents won't be aggravated by it.

The action isn't particularly memorable and most of the jokes fall flat but neither fail hard enough to illicit a reaction beyond a sigh while waiting for the clock to run out.

Glimpses of thought occasionally shine through; Sonic's characterization as a wayward child and his longing for family and companionship actually provide some surprisingly heartfelt moments I wished the movie was willing to lean into more and a fun Roadrunner/Coyote dichotomy seems to almost develop between him and Robotnik that could have really put Carrey's talent further to use.

The film ultimately knows what it wants to be however and, for better or worse, that's calculated studio entertainment, mediocre at best by design, riding the a wave of goodwill from people all too willing to give it goodwill for fixing a screw up without realizing that the same people that greenlit that screw up still had to sign off on everything else. It shows.

By no means is "Sonic the Hedgehog" the artistic peak of any medium but this is nevertheless a series that contains power mad xenphobic echidna tribes, a fox mutant that can twist his 2 tails like helicopter rotors to fly, a half alien hedgehog created in a space lab by a genocidal extraterrestrial war lord and a scientist to research cures for neurological diseases, a comic book multiverse canonically cataloguing adaptations and split timelines of adaptations as alternate realities convoluted enough to make Marvel blush, and irradiated precious stones that warp the fabric of time and reality as we know it.

I'll give the studio credit for realizing a bad character design looked like bad character design. Not for having this kind of material at their disposal and only managing to churn out a mediocre alien meets rando, buddy road trip comedy. It didn't need to be good but it could have at least been memorable.

4 Chaos Emeralds out of 10