Tuesday, December 24, 2024

Rings of Power: SONIC THE HEDGEHOG 3

I have no defense of Sonic the Hedgehog 3 except that I was once an 11-year-old boy. My adult self sat watching this sequel slightly bored by the shiny, proficient formula on screen. If you’ve seen director Jeff Fowler’s first two Sonic the Hedgehog movies, this will be totally familiar—a simply plotted, gently silly scurry across brightly-lit colorful settings while the super-speedy animated blue hedgehog of Sega video game fame tries to protect his adopted human family, and the world, from the villainous machinations of evil scientist Jim Carrey. These are narratively flimsy, emotionally shallow, predictably told cartoon-logic movies. And yet, sometimes movies like this invite the Ghost of Moviegoer Past to step in and watch instead of the Present for a while. In that spirit, I had a good time. This isn’t even the best Sonic movie—that’s 2 by a nose, a perfectly pleasant pileup of kids’ adventure cliches and a good balance of human funny business. But 3 and the others are movies I would’ve enjoyed as a boy. It has likable leads with a funny ensemble, and a brisk pace with varied and imaginative-enough adventure sequences. This one has an early hedgehog versus motorcycle chase down a busy Tokyo street, and later a fight in a vault with tiles that are randomly anti- or extra-gravity. There’s just enough cleverness there. And then there’s Carrey hamming it up, this time in a double role as the villain and his own grandfather. His antics along with the Sega aesthetics are key 90s throwbacks. Is it any wonder the movie has two of the humans high-five and declare it “best decade ever?”

If the common complaint of the first picture was that it put Sonic in the passenger seat to pleasant live-action family comedy from James Marsden, Tika Sumpter, and Natasha Rothwell, this third Sonic goes the other way. It reduces the humans to glorified cameos and spends most of its time with Sonic (Ben Schwartz) and pals Tails (Colleen O'Shaugnessey) and Knuckles (Idris Elba) on the hunt for an evil hedgehog named Shadow (Keanu Reeves) who escaped containment in a secret base and is rampaging across the world looking for revenge against those who captured him. We get lots of flashbacks explaining why he’s upset, and seeding the ground for his eventual change of heart. (Though weirdly it is unacknowledged how one key character in those flashbacks has to be closely related to a key character in the present.) This series, like Fast and Furious before it, is very good about setting up villains to become sidekicks in future entries. And, better than Marvel lately, knows how to tease a new character in the credits of one entry and pay it off immediately in the next. (And easily incorporates events of a streaming series quickly, too.) This might be the ideal form of the modern franchise: cheap, efficient, reliable quality and return on investment, self-referential and fan-flattering without bogging down in self-seriousness, and exactly as ambitious as its target audience wants. It’ll never be great, but it’s always consistent.  Bring on Sonic 4!

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