Hogan Reviews

It’s time to immediately finish off this return to the Game to Movie Marathon as I finally got a chance to sit down and watch the third live action Sonic film, a series that still baffles me how it’s not only a thing but a good thing and a successful thing. My main gripe over STH2 was a few long scenes of the human characters and some really poor humour and thankfully for this third film they seem to have fixed both of those issues as the human characters take a backseat for the most part and the humour is the fun kind of kids film humour that I can still enjoy as an adult, rather than … whatever that stuff was in the long wedding scene last time… Let’s take a look!

I’ll admit going into the film I didn’t feel the same… nostalgic excitement I did going into the first two as this film follows the plot of Sonic Adventure 2, a game I played in my late teens rather than as a kid, and frankly it was halfway through the following game, Sonic Heroes, that I checked out of the Sonic series altogether (apart from Sonic Mania, obviously…) so I have very little attachment to Shadow the Hedgehog, beyond a few basic memories of Adventure 2 and all the countless memes and such that have sprung up since. Still, with that being said: The film opens with a double-scene of Sonic (voiced by Ben Schwartz), Tails (voiced by Colleen O’Shaughnessey) and Knuckles (voiced by Idris Elba) celebrating the anniversary of Sonic arriving on Earth with his adoptive parents Tom (James Marsden) and Maddie (Tika Sumpter), while at the same time a secret facility holding Shadow (voiced by Keanu Reeves, which fits the stoic-ness of the character very well!) experiences a hacking that releases the black Hedgehog, who then takes everyone out and leaves. Sonic’s celebration is cut short by G.U.N. (that’s “Guardian Units of Nations”…) who recruit “Team Sonic” to take out Shadow, but they fail.

Dun-Dun-Dun! Get your cheesy motorbike and gun memes ready! (Seriously, get them ready)

They meet up with Commander Walters (Tom Butler) of G.U.N. who gives us a rundown of what happened in the past with Shadow, but not all of it, but I may as well say it here: Shadow fell to Earth and was picked up by G.U.N. to be experimented on by their scientists including Gerald Robotnik (Jim Carey) the grandfather of Dr. Robotnik (also played by Jim Carey…) who had his granddaughter Maria onsite running around freely. Shadow was treated as a “thing” by everyone but Maria, the two forming a close bond until one day when an escape attempt by Gerald and Shadow ended up getting Maria killed, Gerald arrested and Shadow put into suspended animation by the then-Captain Walters. So basically he’s out for revenge, and after this chat some Badniks arrive and kill Walters before being deactivated by Agent Stone (Lee Majdoub), who brings Sonic and co. to Dr. Robotnik, who is now overweight and disinterested in it all until he hears about the hacking of his own machines. This leads them to team up as they head to the original G.U.N. facility where they not only meet up with Shadow again but with Gerald Robotnik, who was behind it all, and who then teams up with his grandson Ivo for lots of double Jim Carey lunacy. Gerald gets hold of one of two keycards to an old space facility that has the “Eclipse Canon”, which he wishes to use to destroy the main G.U.N. HQ in London.

In order to get the other keycard Tom and Maddie disguise themselves as some of the annoying characters from the previous two films and manage to get it despite a set piece scene in a room with gravity traps across multiple floor tiles that was good fun, but on the way out Shadow assaults Tom (who was disguised as Walters at the time) and hurts him badly. Now with both keycards the two Robotniks and Shadow head up to the Eclipse Canon while Sonic has a crisis of faith-in-his-friends and takes the Chaos Emeralds, turns Super and heads off alone to get revenge for Tom…

(Mostly the back of) Our main cast, minus Shadow (Robotnik’s in the big crab machine!)

It’s a fun film once again. I’ll admit that some bits were a little too cheesy for me (especially in the opening scenes where Tom tells Sonic about responsibility and how he’ll need to trust in doing the right thing at a key moment in the future, literally spelling out what will happen later in the film…) but again, it’s a kids film, I’m not going to be harsh on it for catering to its target audience. The final half an hour delivers of the spectacle as well, only slightly ruined by Jim Carey and Jim Carey having an intentionally silly fight in the middle of what was supposed to be the dramatic climax, kind of killed the tension they were trying to create elsewhere at the moment. That isn’t a “oh it’s a kids film thing” either, that was just… poorly thought out.

Overall Thoughts:

Still crazy that this is a thing. I’d love to send this screenshot to my childhood self and blow him away!

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is a fun family film full of some good gags, great action and thankfully a dramatic decrease in poorly judged humour with its live action cast. While by no means flawless and not as ripe with childhood nostalgic callbacks as the previous two for me, it’s still a good two hours in front of the TV, in my case (and I’m sure a fun time in the cinema as well!)

Sonic and Shadow do battle in space and on the moon as Dr. Robotnik finds out that his grandfather doesn’t intend to destroy G.U.N. HQ but instead plans on wiping out all of humanity for what they did to his granddaughter, leading to the previously mentioned silly cut-back-and-forth fight scenes between the two, one that Gerald wins and manages to set the Eclipse Canon to fire. Tails and Knuckles arrive on the space station to help take out Gerald and try and steer the Cannon away and soon get help from Sonic and Shadow, the latter of whom had seen the error of his ways when Sonic took the on-the-nose advice from Tom earlier in the film at a key moment. Gerald is soon thrown into a deadly laser fence and killed in a throwaway gag moment, then Tails and Knuckles use a teleporting ring to leap out into space and save Sonic while both Shadow and Robotnik make the ultimate sacrifice to save the people of Earth.

Robotnik meets Robotnik! Jim Carey was clearly having a good laugh again.

Sonic apologises to Tails and Knuckles and then they all celebrate with a recovering Tom and Maddie, leading to a scene where Sonic runs into a bunch of Metal Sonics and then is saved by a debuting Amy Rose. Oh and then another scene that shows Shadow survived, because I mean, obviously he did. He survived in the games too due to his popularity, may as well get the reveal out of the way in the films…