Sound Proof
Jeff Fowler’s latest entry in the Sega game film series is a case of the third time being the charm.
Sonic the hedgehog 3
Director: Jeff Fowler • Writers: Pat Casey, Josh Miller, John Whittington, based on the game by Sega
Starring: Ben Schwartz, Jim Carrey, James Marsden, Idris Elba, Colleen O’Shaughnessey, Lee Majdoub, Keanu Reeves
USA / Japan • 1hr 50mins
Opens Hong Kong Dec 26 • I
Grade: B
Sonic the Hedgehog 3, fortunately, is blessed with the power of Keanu Reeves, a cosmic energy so mighty it can throw a force field around Jim Carrey, effectively neutering any of the latter’s negative ions. Like he did in the useless and gratuitous Toy Story 4 – Duke Caboom pining for his Réjean was hilarious – Reeves bafflingly juices the third Sonic film with a genuinely tragic, deeply emotional voice performance as the heavily anticipated Shadow the Hedgehog. He’s the highlight and he makes you forget Carrey is there for big chunks of time.
But glorious as Reeves is, not even he can make Carrey go away entirely, and the rubber-faced one lays on the antics nice and thick in Sonic 3, an exhausting exercise in franchise-building – even if it is the best of the trio so far. If you can’t remember wide swaths of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 no one would hold it against you. That bloated, obnoxious mess had a bad case of sequelitis and is memorable primarily for its gawdawful wedding shenanigans, something about a Chaos Emerald and the introduction of Tails and Knuckles. Though the first film was utterly predictable it was something of a pleasant surprise. The second entry was mostly hot garbage. Rare as it is for a third entry in a franchise to be the best there’s always an exception to the rule. If the first Sonic film seemed like a fluke for making US$320 million in a pandemic, the second, shittier film’s $400 million haul disproved that. When it opened overseas just before Christmas, Sonic 3 had already pulled in nearly US$70 million – and trounced Mufasa: The Lion King.
Sterling, Buck and Yen
And you know why it trounced Mufasa? Becuase its animated characters look animated. As the AV Club pointed out this week, Walt Disney himself poo-pooed the current trend to photo-realism. “Our study of the actual is not so that we may be able to accomplish the actual, but so that we may have a basis upon which to go into the fantastic, the unreal, the imaginative,” he wrote to his animation training department in 1935. But that’s not the point here, the point here is that writing partners Pat Casey and Josh Miller (Violent Night), John Whittington (The Lego Batman Movie) and third-time director Jeff Fowler have balanced Sonic’s silliness with some genuine emotional stakes this time around, used the tech to help the storytelling, not be the story, and in doing so managed to spit out an entertaining family film.
In the wake of echidna Knuckles’s (nicely deadpan Idris Elba) conversion to the good side, the team of him, Sonic (Ben Schwartz), now holder of the Chaos Emeralds, and flying fox thing Tails (Colleen O’Shaughnessey), essentially its Q, get a request from GUN to head to Tokyo and recapture Shadow, who’s somehow been released from his stasis prison and is out to exact revenge on humanity for the death of his friend Maria years before. All roads lead to Dr Ivo Robotnik (Carrey), the mad scientist and Sonic nemesis, and his long-lost, equally mad scientist grandfather Gerald (Carrey yet again) when Team Sonic admits it needs his help. Yes. The fate of the world is on the line.
Regardless of what I clearly think of Carrey (not a lot in case you missed it), his bulging belly manipulations, literal moustache-twirling and OTT mugging worked for the kids in the audience, and in truth worked for plenty of adults; they always have. In other words, if you’re a fan you’ll be tickled. But Carrey’s brand of comedy is thankfully complemented by Reeves as the sad and angry Shadow, an uncannily moving element that is as surprising as anything in the series. Shadow’s moments are sprinkled in between major action set pieces, and so never feel distracting or calculated, and in the end give this Sonic some guts. GUN Director Rockwell (Krysten Ritter), Green Hills Sheriff Tom and his vet wife Maddie (James Marsden and Tika Sumpter), and Robotnik’s put-upon assistant Stone (Lee Majdoub) are… present?
Sonic the Hedgehog 3 ends with a couple of stingers (natch) featuring Metal Sonic and Amy Rose, and by all accounts Sonic fans are very excited by this. If any of them are worried they may never get to see those characters brought to life, they can chill. Sonic the Hedgehog 4 went into development in December and already has an early 2027 release date. Was there really any doubt?