Sonic the Hedgehog Review

Here's a movie that's been through quite the adventure over the course of the last year. Despite video game movies rarely working out, someone at Paramount thought it would be a good idea to make a "Sonic the Hedgehog" movie. Or, better yet, someone in the world came up with the idea, pitched it to Paramount, and Paramount signed off on the project. That alone can be seen as a bit of a strange turn of events, but whatever. "Detective Pikachu" worked out rather well, so I suppose Sonic could, too, right? Haha, yeah... but not with that initial plan. This movie was supposed to come out this past November and when they decided to start advertising it, the most horrific sight you'll ever see graced the internet and no one was happy about it. This Sonic movie was about to become the laughing stock of this generation. A movie to be made fun of for the rest of time. Until the unprecedented happened. Director Jeff Fowler took to Twitter shortly after the trailer dropped, told us all he's heard our complaints, and that they're going to fix it. Say what? I was rather shocked. Filmmakers who actually listen to the fan response, pause production on their film, and set out to do what the fans want? Color me impressed. Regardless of the quality of the movie, that act just earned them my $10.

As it turned out, the revamped Sonic looked rather impressive. Part of me wonders if this was all part of some strange master plan by Paramount where they purposely designed enough of a bad-looking Sonic to create a fake trailer, but had the real version ready to go in their back pocket when they got the horrible reaction that they were going for. So they "paused production" in order to "fix" Sonic, sat back and relaxed for a few months, then kicked things into gear. OK, that probably wasn't what happened. But if it did, it would've been rather genius. Because that bad Sonic certainly got everyone's attention, as did the announcement of them stopping production to redesign Sonic. Finally, when the actual trailers started to show up, the audience reaction was at a complete 180 degree turn from what it was before. And as the frosting on top of the cake, February turned out to be a much better release date for the movie. Instead of having to deal with the likes of "Frozen 2," "Jumanji" and "Star Wars" over the holidays following a November release, Sonic has the family audience in February all to itself. Lucky for them, "Dolittle" was a massive disappointment in January and "Onward" is a whole month away in March. All the stars seem to have aligned for a breakout hit.

Despite all of this commotion, this didn't necessarily satisfy all of my personal concerns about this movie. Yes, the initial design of Sonic was atrocious. And yes, I'm glad that they fixed it. But I think there was a deeper, root issue that stemmed from the fact that I don't know if a live action Sonic film really was a good idea. Why does everything have to be live action these days? And it what world does it make the most sense to bring Sonic into the human world? I think that if we HAD to do a Sonic film, it should be an animated Sonic movie from someone like Illumination or DreamWorks, or Sega joining the animation game with their own new animation film studio. That would seem like the best option. But even then, I'm not sure of the narrative in the games is strong enough to warrant a film adaptation. As a child of the 90s, I liked the Sonic games just as much as the next person. I was much more of a Super Nintendo kid than a Sega Genesis kid, but whenever I got my hands on a Sonic game, I enjoyed it. But the fun of the games was running fast through the hoops, collecting coins and stopping villains. It's like Mario or Donkey Kong. A narrative exists. But that's not what makes the game fun. So how is this all going to translate?

The answer to this is, if I'm being bluntly honest, is that this doesn't translate super well. And I don't know if I really get this fascination of bringing Sonic into the human world. Since I mentioned "Detective Pikachu" at the beginning of this review, perhaps I should say that a Pokemon film makes a lot more sense as a live action production in the human world because the premise of Pokemon is already set in a human world and the specific "Detective Pikachu" game is a lot more centered around a narrative rather than just wandering around, catching Pokemon and defeated gyms. Bringing Sonic into the human world and making him live action feels a lot more like a Smurfs treatment. They didn't need to be live action and they didn't need to be in our world, but the filmmakers decided to anyways and thus they found that there wasn't quite as much to do with it. Now before I get too far down the negative rabbit hole here, I will say that even though the premise doesn't necessarily set this up for the highest level of success, everyone involved in this project does their absolute best to make this work anyways. And for that I have to say that I'm pleasantly surprised at the final results here. This could've been a whole lot worse, but instead it ends up being satisfactory.

The actual premise of the movie involves Sonic transporting to Earth at a rather young age, then spending most of his life staying hidden on Earth in a little Montana town called Green Hills. There's a family he gravitates towards, but instead of formally introducing himself, he hides in the shadows and stalks them. However, one night many years in the future after Sonic initially arrived, he gets super lonely and in a bit of a rage, he runs super ultra fast and causes a power outage across the town. This causes the government to deploy the crazy Doctor Robotnik to investigate what is happening. Robotnik discovers Sonic. Sonic reveals himself to his secret family he's been stalking. James Marsden's character named Tom agrees to help Sonic out and the two of them go on a wild adventure trying to run away from Robotnik, with Sonic's eventual endgame being to use his gold rings to transport himself into a different world so that he can go back into hiding. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the movie. It's a very simple premise because there's not a whole lot you can do with a Sonic movie. And most of it is this buddy comedy with James Marsden and Sonic trying to escape from Robotnik, with plenty of gags, jokes, and action sequences along the way.

Even though it seems unnecessary to throw Sonic into a human world, the human actors all do a great job. James Marsden, Jim Carrey and Tika Sumpter could've taken this as a simple paycheck film, but they all take their roles super seriously. And by that I mean they put their heart and souls into this project in order to make it something that others will actually enjoy watching. Because Jim Carrey is anything but serious in this movie. And that's what makes his character of Doctor Robotnik rather fun.This is Jim Carrey once again embracing his old, wacky 90s self and there's a good enough makeup and hairstyling team to go along with him to make it look like he's not a 57-year-old Jim Carrey, but rather a Jim Carrey who is back in his prime. This is classic Jim Carrey and he's absolutely bonkers in this role, which is exactly what I want from a Jim Carrey performance. But it's not just him. James Marsden is also someone who found the fountain of youth because he looks like he's in his 20s in this movie rather than looking 46. Him and Tika Sumpter as husband and wife make a great young couple even though neither are too terribly young in real life. Better yet, James Marsden has great chemistry with Sonic, which was vital to make this work.

So yeah, there's not much of a plot here and maybe the idea behind this wasn't great, but I found myself really enjoying these adventures of James Marsden and Sonic. Sonic himself is voiced by Ben Schwartz. After looking up Ben Schwartz's IMDb page, I learned that he's done a lot of different voice work, which made him a great choice for Sonic. He does a great job of bringing Sonic to life. As he should be, Sonic is full of energy, making all of his scenes really entertaining. They even take a page from X-Men's Quicksilver in throwing together some super slow motion stuff just for the heck of it and it's rather amusing. I think what impressed me the most is that there's a fair bit of emotion sprinkled in. I didn't think I would care at all for how lonely Sonic was, but there were several scenes where that really showed up, both in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. That got to me. It made me care about Sonic and it made me want him to find true love and friendship. And when that happens with his team-up with James Marsden, there's some solid resolution that makes for a satisfying character arc. All of this I think will be extremely effective when it comes to families and young kids. Even if the kids don't have a pre-established attachment to Sonic, I think they'll fall in love with him.

In wrapping this all up, this is much better than it had any right to be. I think we were all ready to kick this into the dirt as a failed project that should've never come into existence, but instead it really feels like director Jeff Fowler really wanted to make this work as a fun family film that was also nostalgic enough for us adults who grew up with Sonic in the 90s. It's also possible that he had no other choice if he wanted his career to take off. If this was any other experienced director, maybe there wouldn't have been as high of a level of care because one bump in the road wouldn't be the end of the world. But all Jeff Fowler has done in terms of directing is a 2004 short film called "Gopher Broke." If his feature-length directorial debut was a wretchedly awful Sonic film, he can kiss his directing career goodbye. But now I think he's proved himself to be a competent director that deserves to be given additional opportunities following this film. Given that there's a significant tease in the end credits of this film that we all could've seen coming miles away, if Sonic becomes a huge financial success, I would love to see him take on the sequel that the movie definitely wants to do. Sure, this is far from perfect, but as a competently done Sonic film, I'll award "Sonic the Hedgehog" a 7/10.