SONIC THE HEDGEHOG 3 - Mark Reviews Movies

Sonic the Hedgehog 3, Paramount Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 20, 2024

When his cinematic adventures began, Sonic the Hedgehog was a likeable and surprisingly sympathetic character. Transported to Earth from his home planet, he was alone and melancholy and desperate for any kind of connection, and Ben Schwartz's vocal performance possessed a real sincerity to all of those qualities, too. By the end of the first movie, he lost all of that to basically become a fast-running and fast-talking superhero, and the second movie added so many new characters and so much lore that Sonic seemed even less of a character. With Sonic the Hedgehog 3, that trend continues, and now, the blue hedgehog could be seen as a supporting character in his own narrative.

In addition to retaining the expanded cast from the previous outing, the screenplay here by returning writers Pat Casey, Josh Miller, and John Whittington, joining returning director Jeff Fowler, gives Sonic two new characters to overshadow him. The first is another alien hedgehog—a darker variation, in terms of both the coloring of his spines and his general mood. The second is another villain who's a literal, albeit older, mirror image of Sonic's usual foe Dr. Ivo Robotnik, who is again played by Jim Carrey in his old mugging-for-the-camera mode.

This time, he gets to mug twice as much, because he's playing Robotnik's grandfather Gerald, who breaks the fourth wall with his grandson to say their situation is just like an actor playing two parts in the same movie. The jokes in these movies have often felt like a stretch, and now, the filmmakers have stretched the humor so far that it breaks around that point.

Carrey does come across as if he's in a different movie here, having obvious fun playing dual roles, imagining what a grandfather-grandson pair of supervillains on a day out would look like, and dancing with himself through a chamber of laser beams. This sequel puts Carrey and his double villains front and center, which is really too bad for our little blue speedster, who gets to play second fiddle to the gimmicky schtick and third fiddle to his own sort of alter ego.

That character is Shadow the Hedgehog (voice of Keanu Reeves), who arrived on Earth decades before Sonic and was experimented on by Gerald and a team of scientists at G.U.N., the international military/crime-fighting organization that has recruited Sonic and his friends. Shadow has a tragic back story, involving that lonely hedgehog's friendship with a human girl (played by Alyla Browne). Shadow was so grief-stricken and enraged by what happened that G.U.N. essentially froze him for 50 years, lest the chaos energy that gives Shadow his powers cause more destruction than the world has ever known.

The plot, then, has Shadow escape his confinement, Sonic and his team—made up of flying fox Tails (voice of Colleen O'Shaughnesey) and punch-happy echidna Knuckles (voice of Idris Elba)—being sent to stop him, and the trio teaming up with Robotnik. Obviously, the mad scientist teams up with his grandfather to enact some evil plan with Shadow and his chaos energy.

No one should take this seriously, of course, but of course, the filmmakers do. Sure, Carrey is here to make plenty of jokes, pop-culture references, and eruptions of physical comedy, and while the actor has stood out—not in a good way—in the previous movies, that might be why he stands out—in a really not-good way—in this one. Everything with Shadow, his back story, and his desire for world-spanning vengeance is played with such a straight face that the filmmakers give themselves two tonal challenges to confront. The first is Carrey's over-the-top shenanigans, and the second is trying to make a moody, black-spined hedgehog with a cartoon appearance become a legitimate source of tragedy.

The cast here has, perhaps, become too sizeable, since there are also Sonic's human friends, Tom (James Marsden) and his wife Maddie (Tika Sumpter), who need something to do, as well as Robotnik's put-upon assistant Stone (Lee Majdoub) to be abused some more. Oh, Krysten Ritter also plays the director of G.U.N., in a role that might have seemed like a good idea to the screenwriters in the early process—only for them to realize just how many antagonists they wind up with by the end of the first act.

When the eponymous video game character first came to the big screen five years ago, it might have been improbable to guess just how convoluted the character's world and associations would become by this third installment (Those who know the full array of games probably could see it, and this movie's mid-credit scene promises at least two more characters for the next sequel). It's stranger still to think that, by Sonic the Hedgehog 3, the one element of the movies that would feel too absent from them is blue guy himself. Here we are, though, and yes, Sonic is unexpectedly missed at this point.

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