For the terminally miserable fans of a certain Detroit football team, 2024 will be remembered as the year of Sonic and Knuckles.
The Detroit Lions have ascended to a 12-2 record with arguably the best offense in the NFL thanks in large part to two running backs: Jahmyr Gibbs and David Montgomery. The former is one of the fastest players in the league, while the latter boasts an unbelievable toughness that makes him seemingly impossible to tackle. The juxtaposition of Gibbs’ speed and Montgomery’s strength led the duo to be nicknamed “Sonic and Knuckles” by football fans, a phenomenon that Paramount’s marketing department was eager to jump on. From sponsored social media posts and custom cleats to a Thanksgiving Day appearance with actors dressed as the iconic blue hedgehog and red echidna, Detroit football fans have been subjected to a nonstop barrage of semi-organic “Sonic the Hedgehog 3” marketing for months.
It’s never a good sign when the nicest thing you can say about a movie is that its marketing team was online enough to capitalize on some fairly low-hanging fruit. But as a diehard Lions fan, I feared that my subconscious mind was primed to let a magical football season cast the third entry in Jeff Fowler’s mediocre trilogy of SEGA adaptations in a more favorable light than it deserved. Then, the film‘s release week ascended upon us, and the forces of sports and entertainment serendipitously collided. Montgomery suffered a season-ending injury on Sunday, announcing the news of his impending surgery by posting a picture of Sonic consoling a crying Knuckles on his Instagram story. In hindsight, I should have seen it as an omen for what was to come in “Sonic the Hedgehog 3.”
Neither of the previous “Sonic” movies distinguished themselves as high art — or even watchable children’s cinema, for that matter — but the trilogy ends on a low note by doubling down on everything that had already failed twice before. The films were burdened from the start by the impossible task of adding depth to a character whose entire personality amounted to his ability to run really, really fast. (He also has a penchant for chili dogs, but that somehow wasn’t enough to carry three feature-length films.) The series has filled in the gaps by overloading its young audiences with the brightest of colors, the simplest of storytelling, and the most obvious of jokes. The bright spot has always been Jim Carrey’s committed performance as the literal mustache-twirling villain Dr. Robotnik, but his comedic brilliance can only be stretched so far when his only scene partners are spiny CGI mammals who never look like they’re actually in the same room as him.
“Sonic the Hedgehog 3” tries to rectify that problem by giving him another Jim Carrey to play against. The newly unretired actor plays dual roles as both Dr. Robotnik and his grandfather, Gerald Robotnik, which affords him twice the opportunities to rattle off some of the shallowest big-screen comedy writing in recent memory. (If you thought you were safe from “Green Lantern” (2011) jokes until the next Deadpool movie hit theaters, think again.) The only thing more disappointing than a line about Sonic being confused for Detective Pikachu being deemed worthy of inclusion in the trailer is the realization that it truly is one of the film’s best jokes.
Carrey seems admirably game for all of the asininity that the script throws at him, but watching him do bits with himself in front of unconvincing CGI backdrops feels like something closer to brain-rotting children’s TikTok content than anything worth projecting on the big screen. Whether he’s torching his own birthday cake with a flamethrower or dancing with himself through a field of lasers, it’s never easy to shake the sense that the movie was more focused on achieving GIF-able moments than telling any kind of coherent story.
But doubling the number of mad scientists only works when you also double the hedgehogs. Fortunately, “Sonic the Hedgehog 3” has us covered in that department as well. Keanu Reeves joins the cast as Shadow, an ultra-powerful alien hedgehog who spent the past 50 years sleeping off a government-induced coma. The Guardian Units of Nations (G.U.N.) determined that Shadow was too important to kill but too powerful to allow to walk free, so he’s been monitored in a top-secret facility for the past half-century. But when he escapes and takes to the streets, Sonic’s (Ben Schwartz) idyllic domestic life with his adopted San Francisco family (which now includes Knuckles and Tails) is interrupted as he’s forced to save the world from yet another existential threat.
Shadow’s power is so great that Sonic and company have to turn to an unlikeliest ally: Dr. Robotnik. The world’s biggest hedgehog hater is now an overweight slob who spends his days watching telenovelas in his evil lair, but he’s lured out of retirement by the promise of eliminating one of the quilled mammals that have been the bane of his existence. The alliance is predictably short-lived, but it gives the mad scientist the energy he needs to reconnect with his grandfather and embark on his evilest plan to date.
Even with minimal context, almost anyone reading this could figure out how things end, as “Sonic the Hedgehog 3” goes out with the same wildly predictable, one-dimensional storytelling that the franchise came in with. At this point, the most we can hope for is that anyone still watching these knows exactly what they’re getting into. It might be enough to entertain young children or diehard SEGA loyalists, but the rest of us are left to lament that the running time isn’t as fast as its blue protagonist.
Grade: D
A Paramount release, “Sonic the Hedgehog 3” opens in theaters on Friday, December 20.
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