Sonic the Hedgehog

“I’m Sonic. A little ball of super energy, in an extremely handsome package.”

Sonic

The dry spell for films called January is finally over, and we’re getting some fun movies in the theaters again. My first movie of the decade is Sonic the Hedgehog, and I wasn’t fully sure what to expect going into the theater. I played very limited Sonic when I was younger, and mostly knew him from the cartoon Sonic X, so I have appreciation for the character and was cautiously optimistic about the film. I was almost certain it was going to be awful after the first trailer released, but after they announced the film would be delayed to re-design the title character and the second trailer released I had quite a bit of hope for it and got fairly excited for it. I didn’t see it opening weekend, but I eventually got around to it and might go for a second round to see if I missed anything.

I still will never fully understand how the initial design for Sonic was so terrible, because this movie is absolutely full of extremely well placed nods to the games where I can tell the director is a huge fan of the franchise. The name of the small town is “Green Hills” as a nod to the opening level of the game, whenever Sonic gets hit he drops his rings, and several other hidden jems that I won’t get into because they’re a whole lot of fun when you catch them.

Sonic himself was really well done, from the final design to his goofy personality, I enjoyed every moment of screen time with him. They did quite a bit with Sonic’s abilities which was awesome, we got a wide variety of super-speed scenes from him zipping around, to seeing from Sonic’s perspective similarly to the Quicksilver scenes in the X-Men films. As happy as I am they got Sonic right, a movie is only ever as good as its villain, and Jim Carrey did great as Dr. Robotnik. His performance was very Ace Ventura, and I haven’t seen Jim Carrey in a role like that in a long time, it was a whole lot of fun to watch. Tom “Donut Lord” Wachowski is played by James Marsden, and I thought he had some great moments with Sonic. The two of them on a very “buddy-cop” style journey to San Francisco was entertaining with several fun moments along the way.

This is one of the first video game movies that I really enjoyed, and I think it’s biggest strength comes from it knew exactly what it was. It didn’t shy away from goofy character costumes (“It’s a flight suit!”) and other video game tropes that typically cause other game-to-movie transitions to fail. It takes Sonic from his world and dumps him onto ours, he plays by his rules and keeps his abilities from the games even though there’s no way they’d actually work in the real world. Sonic was a whole lot of fun, and as I said before I’m going to try to get a second watch it. My only negative takeaway isn’t something that is really the film or directors fault, but Sonic is still very much a kids film, and most of the jokes that I know kids find hilarious just fell flat with me. Again I’m not saying its bad, it just is what it is, overall I gave Sonic the Hedgehog a 7/10, and I have hopes that we’ll get a sequel. Speaking of potential sequels, make sure you stick around for the credits.

And for anyone who potentially missed the initial trailer with the famously terrible design for Sonic, here it is! I’m kind of hoping we get the version of the movie with the original design in the bonus features or something just to see out of curiosity.