The arrival of Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) makes the Sonic’s Creepy Eyes Controversy seem like it happened 200 years ago. Since then, Sonic became a billion-dollar-grossing movie franchise (on top of the kazillions the video games and related content surely raked in), with most of the core creative team led by director Jeff Fowler remaining intact. And so we got a more-of-the-same-but-more-of-it M.O.: a new character voiced by Keanu Reeves, villain hedgehog Shadow, joins the melee, but more notably, Jim Carrey was lured out of sort-of-retirement to not just reprise his Dr. Robotnik role, but play TWO Dr. Robotniks. The result? A series-best $422 million at the box office, and a shocking 88 percent on the Tomatometer – which, after seeing the movie, I attribute to strategic programming for families (when options are slim for the young’uns, you just pick the one with the talking animal) and the goodwill of a Christmastime release. Because it just ain’t particularly good, folks.
The Gist: PRISON ISLAND. TOKYO BAY, JAPAN. Turns out this high-end state-of-the-art prison for alien creatures ain’t so state-of-the-art. All it takes is for Shadow (Reeves) to wake up, and bam! He busts out of his cryo-tube full of bubbling juice and starts wreaking havoc in Tokyo. We get a brief flashback to decades prior, when Shadow palled around with a little girl named Maria (Alyla Browne) after he crash-landed on Earth and was scooped up by secret government forces or whatever, a story that’ll pick up here and there and fill in a blank or three as the movie goes on. It seems Shadow was once nice but he isn’t anymore, which is the important thing for the emotional arc here, which is a puddle almost deep enough to cover a dime laying flat.
Elsewhere, it’s established that Sonic (Ben Schwartz) and his pals Tails the fox (Colleen O’Shaughnessy) and Knuckles the echidna (Idris Elba) are a happy pseudo-family with Tom (James Marsden) and Maddie Wachowski (Tika Sumpter). They go camping and throw a party for Sonic’s “bearthday,” namely, the day he arrived on Earth. They barely get a s’more down when our three fighting cartoon animals are recruited by official people with helicopters and crap to help them catch Shadow, who, again, might just be sad instead of mad. Some of us deal with grief by eating lousy Chinese food and binging old Futuramas, while some of us exact inexact revenge upon the population of an entire planet. You do you, I say.
However, the powers that be coerce Sonic, Tails and Knuckles to team up with someone who could help them deal with Shadow, and that someone is their arch enemy, Dr. Robotnik (Carrey), or, if you’re Sonic, “Dr. Robuttstick.” Robotnik’s been a slob languishing in his own filth and watching telenovelas, so he cleans up and starts bugging his eyes out and putting conditioner in his absurd mustache again, and then finds out his long-lost grandfather Gerald Robotnik (also Carrey) is still kickin’. The plot only gets more needlessly complicated from here, including a dire threat to destroy the entire planet and a desperate attempt to stop it. You don’t say! And yet, it still feels like almost nothing.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: “Are you Detective Pikachu?” a kid asks Sonic, reminding me of Detective Pikachu. “Couldn’t we ask Tom Cruise to do this?” says Sonic when facing a daunting physical stunt, reminding me of Mission: Impossible and Top Gun: Maverick. “I haven’t seen one of those since I hate-watched Green Lantern in 2011!” exclaims Dr. Robotnik, reminding me of Green Lantern.
Performance Worth Watching: Are two Jim Carreys better than one? Dunno, but they’re definitely better than zero Jim Carreys, and zero Jim Carreys would make these Sonic movies even more forgettable. He’s pretty funny as he Fire Marshal Bills his way through the movie twice, but is that enough to save it? My friends, that is not.
Memorable Dialogue: Knuckles burns his main s’more component black over the campfire: “I have dishonored my marshmallow,” he laments.
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: I wanted to run as fast as I could from Sonic 3, not because it’s necessarily bad – its $120 million budget is all up there, in its plethora of high-octane action sequences, dished up in eyeball-bursting color – but to maintain consciousness. Reader, I was bored out of my mind by this, and the other two Sonics. Ten-year-olds (plus or minus five years) are the target audience here, and they’re bullseyed with all the firepower a Hollywood marketing team can muster. It’ll work for them. Parental expenditures will not go wasted, unless one’s goal is intellectual enrichment instead of noisy-ass escapism.
But the crossover audience will be either left overwhelmed by the incessant zippery and snoozing in the dust, or debating how much Jim Carrey is enough. Is two Carreys too much? Sort of, but watching a Jim Carrey x Jim Carrey dance sequence amidst a field of niftily refracting laser beams while thundering techno blitzes our ears? That’s fun, you have to admit. Carrey exchanging mashed-potato moves and semi-puerile witticisms with himself is a novelty, but it’s not enough to carry an entire picture, especially if you’re old enough to make OG Fire Marshal Bill references.
The rest of the film is rough sledding for those of us not invested in the “mythology” of the various video games – those who are should hang out for a couple of end-credits sequences, sigh – or anyone who struggles to take it seriously when Keanu Reeves says angsty things like “pain is all I know,” because Keanu Reeves is playing a cartoon hedgehog wearing Keds and a red highlights in his hair. Does anybody really want Sonic 3 to be more fodder for the growing pile of grief-and-losscore? Good grief, I say. There is, however, a thematic thread about the hollow nature of revenge-seeking, which reminds me that now is a good time to end this review, before one more neg by this h8r makes me look like I missed the point entirely.
Our Call: Those endeared to the Sonic movie-franchise formula will find Sonic 3 entirely watchable, which makes it a classic FFO (For Fans Only) situation. The rest of us can SKIP IT and fire up the Carrey clips if the funnyguy’s dearth of recent movie roles (outside these films, he’s been in zero movies since 2016) has us in need of a smile.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
