Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and all the images you see in this review are owned by Paramount Pictures
Directed by Jeff Fowler
The Sonic movies have been only slightly better than mediocre, but I’ve given them praise where it’s been deserved, and audiences have been more than kind as the films have racked up impressive box office numbers. Certainly small potatoes compared to The Super Mario Bros Movie’s billion dollar haul, but Sonic has been jogging behind my main man Mario for over three decades now and is just happy to be in the conversation. With this third movie, however, it’s time for SEGA and Paramount to find out if the audience that turned out for classic Sonic will stick around for the more modern iteration and all the baggage that comes with it. Will this be another hit for our favorite blue hedgehog, or are parents gonna dip out before they have to explain who Rouge the Bat is to their seven-year-olds? Let’s find out!!
Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles (Ben Schwartz, Colleen O’Shaughnessey, and Idris Elba) are enjoying their life of carefree picnics with their adopted human parents Tom and Maddie (James Marsden and Tika Sumpter), but this idyllic situation comes with a price as GUN will occasionally call these three in to deal with whatever strange mess they’ve gotten into now. The latest disaster that our team is airdropped into is a renegade alien that had been in GUN captivity for the last fifty years but has finally escaped and is ready to exact his vengeance on the world. Said renegade, who seems quite ambivalent to good and evil, is Shadow the Hedgehog (Keanu Reeves) who can teleport, has rocket boots, and can glower with the intensity of a thousand suns. He proves to be far stronger than Sonic Team can handle on their own, so they are forced to recruit Ivo Robotnik and his assistant Stone (Jim Carrey and Lee Majdoub) in order to take down the rebellious hedgehog. What secrets are lurking in Shadow’s tragic backstory that has led him to be such a jerk, and is he right to resent GUN as much as he does? Can Robotnik be trusted to stay on the side of good, especially when his and Shadow’s past are far more intertwined than anyone could have realized? Is there any chance we can just root for the bad guys, because they seem like they’re having a lot of fun in this.
As the old saying goes, the third time’s the charm because this is a pretty good movie. It’s far from perfect, and many of the issues with the previous films are still present and account for, but it finally has a unique identity of its own that feels more authentic to the Sonic franchise without feeling any less accessible to general audiences who don’t know Shadow from Adam. I’d even go so far as to say that it’s better than the Illumination Mario movie, which was a perfectly adequate middle of the road affair, but smoothed off so many of its edges that there was nothing worth talking about aside from Bowser’s musical interlude. This movie takes a few chances with its wacky over the top set pieces and its more sincere character moments, and even the straight-up bizarre decisions it makes are at least interesting to watch play out. Keanu Reeves is an odd choice for Shadow given how instantly recognizable his voice is, but he is a good actor and puts the right kind of weight behind the cheesy early-2000s angst that define Shadow’s character. Jim Carrey somehow manages to crank the absurdity even higher by playing two characters who are constantly bouncing off of each other, and while it can grate a bit from time to time, he’s still one of the highlights of the film. Sadly, the rest of the human cast is still terrible, with James Marsden and Tika Sumpter being even more ill-equipped to stick around for this adventure than they were in the last one. The worst, however, has to be Krysten Ritter as the antagonistic GUN commander, who is a phenomenal actor and is simply wasting her time in an utterly useless role that she can’t even have fun with like Brie Larson in the last Fast and the Furious movie. Thankfully, the human presence in this is greatly diminished as the filmmakers finally seem to understand that we’re watching a Sonic movie to see Sonic stuff, but there is an extended sequence right in the middle that brings them all back and is easily the low point of the movie.
As appreciated as these little improvements are, the real test for this movie and its biggest mystery for me was how they were going to handle Shadow; a character with a very shaky history in the franchise. To my utter astonishment, the filmmakers seem to have done their homework and grasped the core appeal of the character while chucking most of the extraneous nonsense. Yes, he still drives a motorcycle and shoots guns, but frankly, that’s kind of what you want from the guy even if it is utterly ludicrous, and it works in a very fun action scene early in the movie. For the most part, they just simplified his backstory to its core elements, made a few changes to iron out the confusing continuity, and put the focus on his relationship to Maria who we see in extended flashback sequences. Shadow feels like an actual character and not just a scowling rival for Sonic to chase after, and the plot progression reflects this conflict within him. He’s pained and angst ridden for the exact same reasons he is in the games, but there’s a softer edge that’s allowed to peek out and give him a sense of genuine sadness in addition to his bitterness. They even manage to make the mastermind villain, the one whose there so that Shadow doesn’t look so bad in comparison, come off as pained and broken rather than simply megalomaniacal. For this series of movies based on this rather simplistic franchise, it would have been easy for them to just lean into the arch and clichéd nonsense that it’s all based on, but instead they put in the extra work and the movie is significantly better for it.
With each subsequent movie, we seem to be moving further and further away from the generic kids film that the studio had initially planned and more into… well, whatever you’d call a typical Sonic game. I suppose what I’m struggling with is how much of this is simply Pavlovian, as I clap when they do the things in the games or play the songs that are embarrassingly dated but oh so nostalgic. Is there a good movie in here? That’s a tough question with a complicated answer. The movie’s target audience is young kids and the parents in their mid-thirties who are dragging those kids to the theater and remember playing the Dreamcast when it first came out. For that particular overlap, I think it succeeds very well, and as a Sonic fan who finds the franchise as laughable as it is genuinely entertaining, I appreciate how they managed to take the utterly nonsensical storyline of Adventure 2 and turn it into something resembling a coherent narrative. I appreciate that they take Shadow seriously, as it would have been far easier to simply take pot shots at the Hardcore Hedgehog gimmick. I even appreciate that they’re developing the relationship between the three furry leads, with Tails and Knuckles getting plenty of screen time and playing key roles in both the plot and in Sonic’s character arc. Still, for anyone who is not a child or a Sonic kid at heart, the plot doesn’t have a lot of depth to it beyond the angsty characters, and the humor can run thin with Jim Carrey having to pick up the slack on more than one occasion, but it all comes together in a way that doesn’t feel slapdash or halfhearted, and it’s genuinely unique which can’t be said for a lot of movies aimed at this particular audience that isn’t just another Marvel movie.
I suppose Sonic’s strength is that you don’t have to take it too seriously. There’s a legacy for sure given that he’s one of the few remaining survivors of the Console Wars, but there’s no prestige tied to the franchise, not after games like Sonic 06 or Sonic Forces, so there are no expectations for it to be more than nostalgic junk. This has definitely allowed for many interesting little corners of the fandom as the brand doesn’t feel so sacrosanct that you can’t experiment here and there, and while it took us a while for the movies to take that message to heart, it’s given us one of the better video game movies of the modern era. I don’t know if the plot has enough depth to keep non-fans interested in its very silly characters or if the humor from Jim Carrey can carry this all the way to the end, but for whatever it’s worth, I found quite a bit to enjoy in this one and am frankly looking forward to the fourth one of these far more than whatever sequel Illumination is pumping out for Mario. Then again, they’re gonna run out of games that are generally considered good sooner rather than later, and while I’d be genuinely interested to see how they try to pull off a character like Silver, that might be the time to jump back onto the more dependable Mario ship. I may like this movie, but Sonic has let me down too many times before…
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