2024, PG, 110 min. Directed by Jeff Fowler. Voices by Ben Schwartz, Keanu Reeves, Colleen O'Shaughnessey, Idris Elba. Starring Jim Carrey, James Marsden, Tika Sumpter.
In an age of badly filmed CG slop, it's rare to find a cinematographer who understands how to make the modern cinematic digital image intelligible. So full praise must go to Brandon Trost, the man behind the lens of dramas like Nightbitch and Can You Ever Forgive Me?, who evades all the potential traps of speedy blur and motion-capture sickness in Sonic the Hedgehog 3. The latest in the film franchise based on the 33-year-old video game series, it should be a case study in film schools for clarity in an age of cluttered screens. In this brightly colored world, Trost makes images pop and vibrate, making this latest in the beloved series easy to watch in a way that seemingly evades most modern multiplex fare.
Sadly, that's one of the few areas of clarity in Sonic the Hedgehog 3.
How far these films have fallen. The 2020 original, Sonic the Hedgehog, was a shockingly entertaining slice of kid-friendly high-speed antics, affably written and with surprisingly sweet performances from James Marsden and Tika Sumpter as the small-town couple who take in the superfast blue alien (voiced by Schwartz). The sequel, 2022's Sonic the Hedgehog 2, built out the universe by adding in two of Sonic's most fan-favorite alternate playable characters, Knuckles the Echidna (Elba playing the pugilistic mammal as a Drax the Destroyer knockoff) and two-tailed flying fox Tails (O'Shaughnessey). Now it seems we're trapped in a two-year treadmill of Sonic movies that play on nostalgia for the franchise ... and that's seemingly enough.
For those that care deeply about the continuity (and there are a lot of those people), Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is more or less a film version of 2001's Sonic Adventure 2. This was basically Sega's belated attempt to add a Nineties edgy feel to the franchise via a surprising amount of global domination, death, and the addition of an antihero version of Sonic called Shadow. Filled with vengeance, and therefore suitably voiced here by Keanu Reeves (because, you know, John Wick), he's been in stasis for 50 years because he's edgy. Rahr. Of course, he escapes and heads off on a high-speed collision course with the irritatingly chirpy Sonic, a clash that becomes an underdeveloped metaphor for nature versus nurture. After all, if Sonic lost everything that matters to him, would he become a kill-crazed speed demon, or would he remain the kindhearted soul that Tom took in?
If this seems a little heavy for a Sonic movie, that's because it is. There are ways that the script by the returning writing team of Pat Casey, Josh Miller, and John Whittington could have handled this important life lesson about anger in a more family-friendly way. Instead, the film flips between unimpressive banter and disturbingly high-stakes danger. There's no coherence here, each scene sitting in disjointed discomfort with the next.
What's worse is that, somehow, double the Jim Carrey does not equal double the fun. His return to family-friendly, over-the-top character hijinks in the first Sonic was a true high point, as he grinned and schemed behind the moustache of the villainous Dr. Robotnik. It was arguably his first measuredly OTT performance since Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events in 2004, and it was a joy to watch the comedic genius behind Ace Ventura and the Grinch flex those muscles once again. Here he plays both Robotnik and his own whitehaired grandfather, Gerald, and while their scenes together are fun, they never feel attached to the rest of the movie. The high point may well be the duo dancing for Trost's crystal-clear lens. It's just a shame that everything else he's charged with capturing is such a soulless, directionless pile of references and Easter eggs.