I’ll be honest here: I foolishly thought that all the tweets about Sonic flossing were about Sonic promoting dental health.
This probably means that I’m uncool and no longer hip with the kids, and it also probably means that I’m no longer qualified to write a review about the blue, chili-dog eating hedgehog.
Another disqualifier is probably that one of my favorite video games growing up was Sonic and the Black Knight– a notoriously terrible game.
However, I’m nothing if not opinionated, so I’m going to write the review anyway.
Unlike Nintendo’s 2019 Detective Pikachu, Sega didn’t attempt to put the viewer in a fictional world. Briefly, we saw Sonic’s home planet– a world straight out of a video game level– before his mentor was murdered in front of him and she handed off rings to send him to a different world where he would need to hide his powers. For the bulk of the film, however, Sonic lives in a Montana town named after the first level of the first Sonic game: Green Hills. He lives in relative solidarity, save for when he looks in the windows of neighbors to watch movies.
One of the more memorable scenes to me was one where Sonic balled himself up and hid among soccer balls and baseballs in an attempt to avoid drones that looked an awful lot like Wheatley from Portal. It was E.T., okay? They remade the scene from E.T. but instead of hiding in a bunch of stuffed animals and chilling out until Robotnik (Jim Carrey) was gone, Sonic made a mess of the attic and got both him and Tom (James Marsden) in a decent amount of trouble. Like, fist fight with Jim Carrey level of trouble.
The movie could have done with some Sam Medes-style side-scrolling action. As it was, the movie was simply a roadtrip with an alien, which is underwhelming when said alien can supposedly run faster than the speed of light. Instead, the movie showed us blur frames and apparent teleportation, with the occasional frame of reference of “he’s so fast that everything else stops.”
It’s a cheesy and disappointing way to demonstrate a character who’s known for his games chock-full of constant action. It’s almost dull, too. To defeat him, Robotnik needs to move as fast as sonic, which ruins the movie illusion of Sonic’s speed.
And you know what? Despite all of that, in some weird way, Sonic works.
Sure, Sonic’s voice (Ben Schwartz) is weirdly disembodied, sounding isolated and dampened in a recording booth rather than amongst his surroundings. And, sure, some of the jokes fail to land (or they landed too hard– I had to look up this movie’s rating after I left the theater. It was rated PG, which means that jokes about drug dealers are allowed, I guess).
The cast seemed like they were having a good time. Jim Carrey especially. There’s a decently long montage within the movie where Dr. Robotnik dances while figuring out how to use Sonic’s quill to his advantage. In any other movie, and maybe with any other actor, the scene would have felt incredibly out of place. As it was, it was just… fun.
And Sonic’s loneliness resonated. It was sad to watch him watch everyone from the shadows. The solo game of baseball, advertised in the trailers as a gag, was actually really upsetting if you look at it for what it is: a desire for communication, a longing for friendship. When Sonic finally got a high five at the end of the movie, it was enough for me to say “aww.”
Sonic’s joy at being shown a single ounce of compassion and kindness… It filled me with love, okay?
It doesn’t feel fair to criticize a kid’s movie the way I would, say, Uncut Gems. Were there a few plot holes? Yeah, a handful. Why didn’t Sonic use the rings to go somewhere else on Earth rather than the Mushroom Plant? How does Sonic know so much about pop culture? Why was the government immediately so forgiving after Robotnik was gone? They were the ones who hired him, shouldn’t Tom and his wife still be, at least, under arrest? Did they enroll Sonic in school?
But at the end of the day: it was a movie made for kids, and it landed. All of the children in the theater were laughing and crying and invested.
Sonic was made to entertain, and it did. I laughed at it more than I expected to. I got more emotional than I thought I would. Hell, one of the notes I wrote while watching was, “This is so sad what the fuck???”
If this movie made me feel genuine empathy for a lonely blue hedgehog who managed to blow out the power of the entire pacific northwest by playing a shitty game of baseball, I’m saying it’s good. Perfect? No, but compared to some other movies in the Video Game Film genre, Sonic was watchable and wasn’t just a collection of cut scenes copy and pasted onto a roll of film. The movie gave Sonic a personality, a motive, a basis to grow as a character. So you know what? I liked it, I’d watch it again, and I think you should see it, too.
