‘Where am I? What year is it? Is the Rock president?‘
Like most kids of my generation, I spent large swathes of my childhood playing video games. I was a Sega man, just like Everett was a Dapper Dan man. That meant that Sonic the Hedgehog was a big deal for me. I spent hours and hours playing the various incarnations of Sonic (even Sonic Spinball for chrissakes), I bought Sonic the Comic, I had stickers, posters, t-shirts – the whole nine yards. I was as horrified as anyone then when the widely panned first trailer landed for Jeff Fowler’s Sonic the Hedgehog movie. While the finished product isn’t anywhere near as bad as that shitshow suggested it could have been, this still feels like a missed opportunity…
Under threat on his home planet, Sonic (Ben Schwartz) escapes to Earth where he comes to the attention of powerful lunatic Dr. Robotnik (Jim Carrey). Our favourite blue hedgehog meets up with small town cop Tom (James Marsden) to attempt to foil Robotnik’s evil plan.
I went into this movie primed and ready for some sweet, sweet nostalgia. I was excited about Sonic sure, but I was equally psyched to see Tails, Knuckles and all the other weird and wonderful characters I have come to know and love. On all of these points, I was to be disappointed. Putting Sonic in the real world takes away some of the lustre of what made the games so special, despite a half hearted attempt to recreate the Green Hill Zone as the fictional town of Green Hill. Indeed, there isn’t really much here to link this movie to the source material. Dr. Robotnik doesn’t get his trademark cropped haircut until the final scenes and Tails doesn’t appear until after the final credits. While this does set up Sonic the Hedgehog 2 nicely, it renders this film a little flat.
Fowler fares better with his casting. Schwartz does a great job in making a traditionally quite annoying character warm and endearing, Marsden is always solid playing an everyman and even Carrey, an actor who I mostly detest, handles the challenge of playing one of the 90s most enduring villains with style and panache. Here’s hoping that the upcoming sequel gives all of them some better material to work with.
Sonic the Hedgehog is probably better than it has every right to be, but it is undoubtedly a kid’s film. While that’s not a bad thing necessarily, I didn’t feel like there was much here for me, an original Sonic stan. Maybe next time…