"Sonic The Hedgehog" Review - The Fast and the Furiously Stupid

Lets’ be real right out of the gate. Would any of you even consider seeing this if it weren’t for the memes we got last year? My guess is you probably wouldn’t. After all, it’s just another tireless reboot of another popular product/game/franchise etc. that we’ve gotten way too much of in the past 5 years. But this particular movie got everyone’s attention for the most bizarre and mysterious reasons. Sonic, along with Cats, became the butt of all movie jokes in 2019 when their respective trailers revealed the hideous designs that were born out of questionable VFX. With Cats, it was too late to save from crash and burn disaster. But Paramount did something that’s super rare in Hollywood to do, and that is listen to the fans. As a result, we were rewarded with a much better redesign of our favorite speedy blue character that’s on par with the designs of Detective Pikachu or Rocket Raccoon. Adding in Ben Schwartz’s spectacular voicing performance only makes the redesign better, which ultimately is one of three reasons why this movie is tolerable at best. The other reasons being Jim Carrey’s funny as hell take on Robotnik and James Marsden’s charming and funny personality in a fun local cop.

All three actors carry this lousy simple story and make it somewhat alright. Sure, kids will love it, and video game nerds will probably cream for some video game references. But the whole movie is riddled with basic writing that doesn’t give too much of an effort to be even slightly better than it already is. The only thing that makes up for the basic plot lines and fart jokes are the comedy moments that highlight why Sonic and Robotnik are so beloved. You can tell that whoever worked on this really did their research.

There’s not much else to say as Sonic does just the bare minimum to get a passing grade from kids and video game nerds. I applaud the efforts to make Sonic look fantastic. I just wish there was as much effort to make this kids flick more on the lines of LEGO Movie than literally any kids movie that is released nowadays.

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