Mark Reviews Movies: SONIC THE HEDGEHOG

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 13, 2020

Sonic the Hedgehog, the second most famous video game avatar and mascot (I'd guess, if only based on longevity and the number of games associated with him), gets a narrative feature with the appropriately titled Sonic the Hedgehog. For those who don't know, Sonic the Hedgehog is, as his label suggests, a hedgehog. He's blue and runs really, really fast—as in superhero-levels of fast.

If this doesn't make sense, think of the other famous, long-running video game avatars and mascots. We have the Italian plumber, who smashes bricks with his head and stomps on weird creatures in a magical realm filled with mushrooms, and a man who's only a yellow head, who eats glowing pellets while being chased by ghosts. In terms of back story and characterizations, only based on descriptions of the avatars and the games' stories, Sonic probably falls between those two. He collects gold rings (not coins, like his plumber competitor) while racing around various worlds filled with tracks, stunt setpieces, and enemies created by the game's central villain.

This is to say that any filmmakers who want to bring Sonic to the screen for a fully-fledged story have a lot of work to do. The story for this movie comes from screenwriters Patrick Casey and Josh Miller, who show Sonic in his video game element during a prologue, in which the blue hedgehog races through his home world, only to be discovered by some villainous creatures wearing masks.

He escapes with the help of the owl who raised him and who sacrifices herself so that he can escape through a portal, created by one of those gold rings. Maybe the games beefed up Sonic's background as they proceeded through the decades, but this seems far removed from the earlier memories of the character and the games—back when they were founded upon 16-bit pixels.

Sonic (voice of Ben Schwartz) ends up on Earth, where he matures from childhood and hides in a cave near a small town in Wyoming. He's a lonely little hedgehog (little compared to humans but gigantic relative to other hedgehogs, of course), who spies on the locals and pretends that he's friends with them. As long as they don't discover him, Sonic can remain safely in this place for the rest of his life—as sad and unfulfilling as a life without friends or any kind of contact with others can be.

Is it weird to say that Sonic's situation is a little affecting? He's a computer-generated creation, obviously, which the animators have made to look like 3-D rendering of the video game character (Some may recall a little kerfuffle when the first draft of the character, looking like an unholy monster with strange proportions and human teeth, was seen in the early advertising). From a design standpoint, Sonic is an ideal mascot—strange but in a way that's instantly memorable, cute but showing just enough of an attitude to counteract that, brightly colored so that no one can miss him. As the protagonist of a feature-length movie, Sonic gets a sad back story to make him sympathetic, and then he becomes an ideal mascot again.

The plot here is the familiar stuff of any kind of tale about a visiting outsider from another world aimed at kids. Sonic is discovered, after he causes a large electrical outage in a speedy fit of melancholy. The head honchos at the Pentagon want to find the cause of the power outage, and they assign Dr. Robotnik (Jim Carrey, returning to his old days of making funny, exaggerated faces, gestures, and vocal inflections), a technology whiz with a big ego, to investigate.

Meanwhile, Sonic, losing his gold rings when they fall through a portal and end up on top of a skyscraper in San Francisco, enters the life of Tom Wachowski (James Marsden, a good and most gracious sport in the thankless role of the sidekick to a computer-generated character). He's the town's local Sheriff, who's preparing to take a job as a cop in San Francisco. With Robotnik chasing them, the hedgehog and the helpful human have to drive to the big city to find Sonic's rings.

The worst that can be said of the movie is that it's generic and the plot goes from comic bit to action sequence while following a predictable path. Also, Sonic is less a character than a joke machine with an adolescent attitude, and Carrey's shtick feels a bit desperate. The violence, set in the real world and not some fantasy realm, gradually becomes a bit extreme for something that looks so innocent and otherwise behaves in a similar manner (Robotnik, flying in a craft armed with lasers, shoots recklessly through a major city, and the camera follows Tom and his wife, played by Tika Sumpter, for a long stretch as they fall to what would be most gruesome deaths).

Other than all of those things, the best that can be said of the movie is that it's relatively harmless. Sonic the Hedgehog doesn't need to make a star out of its eponymous figure, because he already is. The movie just forgets to make him an actual character.

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