Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (2024)

PG mainly because the Shadow origin story involves the death of a child.  Also, um...Shadow has a gun.  Sure, it's more of a blaster than it is a gun, but that's very in the vein of Shadow.  Robotnik also dances around some innuendo. (It's that innuendo-y.  He has to dance around it!)  Also, the plot involves murdering everyone on Earth.  You know what?  When I write these things out, it seems pretty bad!

DIRECTOR:  Jeff Fowler

I am going to write this first part to make my kid happy.   He said that he couldn't wait to read what I thought about it.  Boy oh boy!  Sonic the Hedgehog 3 was definitely one of the movies of all times.  I loved seeing how excited my kids were for this movie.  They lost their minds.  In the post-credit sequences alone, they were happier than anything I tried to make them happy.  For kids, this movie might be their favorite movie ever.  Okay, Henry, stop reading here.

Is...is he gone?  Okay, adults.  This movie is fine.  It is absolutely fine.  There's nothing notoriously bad about the movie. The big thing that I have to remember is that this movie wasn't really made for me in the least.   Okay.  Maybe it is a bit.  I mean, just the talent alone behind this movie is pretty appealing for adults.  But I'm going to be honest, while Sonic 3 is the biggest movie of the three films, it also somewhat feels like the one with the least heart.  I mean, this is a movie where an alien hedgehog mourns the death of a little girl and I still say that the movie kind of lacks heart.  Part of the problem is that Sonic 3 is aggressively plot driven while the first two movies are far more character driven.  I even think that the writer of the movie is aware of this.  The third act of the movie has Sonic going rogue. Towards the end of the second act, the movie brings up the major plot hole in the movie.  Sonic the Hedgehog 2 ends with a rad fanservice moment:  Sonic turning into Super Sonic.  If you were a gamer in the '90s, Super Sonic was something special.  You had to be incredibly good at the game and you unlocked all the chaos emeralds so you could just nuke the world.  Well, considering that the Sonic franchise was really good at making the '90s stuff look cool again, the last movie ended with all-powerful meganuke Sonic the Hedgehog.  He could destroy anything.

But the problem with that powerful of a character is the question of "Why doesn't Sonic use that power every time that he has a problem to deal with?"  It's something that we ignored between games.  Sonic always had to start at Ground Zero in each game.  But this is a movie where continuity has to have some place in the overall story of the characters.  So Knuckles mentioned that the Chaos Emerald that gives Sonic his Super Sonic powers (yeah, I'm now becoming aware of how silly this continuity sounds in retrospect) cannot be used because it's too dangerous, regardless of how much trouble the world is.  I'm taking a really roundabout way to say that Sonic betrays Knuckles in the third act by taking the Chaos Emerald because he's really angry that Ted got hurt.  It's just that...most of the movie isn't about that.  Most of the movie is very much a superhero movie where the protagonist has learned all of his lessons in the previous movies and now he's just dealing with a villain that is way more powerful than he is.  It's got a little bit of that Fast and the Furious sequel going on.  Any kind of character stuff feels really tacked on.  

And I hate to be the guy who is saying this, mainly because I'm oddly rooting for the franchise to succeed, but the movie series might be running into the same problems that the video games ran into.  Sonic has always had the problem of being "so extreme" that people roll their eyes at the thought of the characters.  The movies did a lot to repair this, mainly by presenting an approachable movie that wasn't about being cool so much as it was just about being fun.  But we just had a movie about Sonic fighting Shadow, a darker version of Sonic with rollerblades and a gun.  The last movie had Knuckles, a more extreme version of Sonic.  Just to go even more spoilery, the next movie is going to have Metal Sonic.  If you were to say "more extreme", you could substitute "extreme" with "metal" pretty easily.  The story has kind of been told.  We're just having bigger villains and bigger consequences when, in all honesty, we've basically reached maximum capacity when it comes to plot consequence.  So, it's just dull when you don't really care.  And the weird thing is...

...I absolutely don't care about Shadow.  I don't know why.  The movie does Sonic Adventure 2 even better than Sonic Adventure 2.  It's that I'm bored with the entire concept.  So if I don't care about Shadow and find little empathy for him, what is there to really grasp onto?  Part of the issue I have with Shadow is that his revenge plan doesn't make a lot of sense to me.  He teams up with a newly introduced elder Robotnik to blow up the world.  Both of them want to blow up the world because...a little girl died?  I mean, I get that he'd want to get revenge on G.U.N. (a version of S.H.I.E.L.D. that was introduced in the Knuckles TV show...which is actually super duper fantastic).  But where does the extinction of the human race come in.  Okay, here's me REALLY trying to find connection with Shadow.  Shadow is an alien. He learned to love humans despite the tests that were run on him.  But then the same humans killed their own so he associated all humans with the people from G.U.N.  A stretch.  I even have to say that, as you can imagine, Shadow comes around to Sonic's perspective when Sonic refuses to stoop to his level.  It's such a light switch moment that it felt like Shadow's motivation was never really all that deep.

The one real win?  It's one that I'm oddly super happy for.  I don't think I've seen Jim Carrey have this much fun with a character in a long time.  It took me a minute to warm up to Carrey's Robotnik in the first movie, but now I'm all on board.  I know that he claims that he's being paid a ton to come back to these movies.  But Carrey is being funny as heck in these movies.  Sure, he's doing his Count Olaf from A Series of Unfortunate Events.  But he really seems to like these movies.  Maybe I'm seeing as Michael Douglas's transition from Ant-Man to Ant-Man and the Wasp.  Sure, a lot of it comes from the fact that he's playing double duty, almost exclusively playing across from himself.  But he looks genuinely happy even though he's coming out of retirement to make Sonic movies.  Sure, he keeps giving himself an out at the end of these movies because his character died yet again in this one.  But that's where the humor comes from and he's in rare form with this one.  Yeah, I'm not ashamed.  He's good and I'm going to comment on that.

The movie is fine.  It's aggressively fine.  I almost fell asleep at one point, but that's because I'm an old man at a Sonic the Hedgehog movie in the first moments of Christmas break.  Yeah, I fall asleep at things.  Still, the movie is fine.  I'll go as far as to say that I'll probably watch it with the kids again.  But it's a lot of noise without a lot of substance.