It’s, perhaps, a lucky sleight of hand that the majority of films now playing in local cinemas offer great opportunities of counterprogramming for the more serious national and regional issues that we’re facing. And of the current slate of action adventures, unreal horrors and improbable adventures none is as defiantly uninterested in notions of reality as “Sonic the Hedgehog” which is enjoying a second week in local cinemas. One year after the release of the moderately successful “Detective Pikachu”, the general strangeness of the Sega video-game franchise becoming a live-action film is perhaps not as strident in its bizarreness, and yet the more than $90 million USD project budget for “Sonic the Hedgehog” seems like a lot for such a conceptually weird film. But here, we are. The film itself isn’t as weird, in fact the film is aggressively familiar.
After an opening scene that occurs in media res for one (very unnecessary) reason, we’re quickly briefed on the history of Sonic’s journey from distant planet to earth. A series of successive misfortunes lead our plucky (talkative) hedgehog to creating an accident power-surge across a number of states that’s so great the US government gets involved. So uncertain are they about its genesis that they bring in Dr Robotnik, a tech-genius-cum-megalomaniac, who devotes himself to figuring out Sonic’s powers. So, armed with his only his speed and the help of Sherriff Tom, an affable small-town police-officer, Sonic goes on the run.
Call it the early year cinema dependence on spectacle, but “Sonic” is yet another 2020 film that seems almost hostilely ambivalent about plot. From the opening hook that riffs on the “you’re probably wondering how I got here” joke, everything in Sonic is emphatically devoted to skirting narrative specificity, instead simply riffing on familiar tropes. If there’s one narratively significant thing in the film it’s the voice-over, which is the only explanation for that opening. Writers Pat Casey and Josh Miller are devoted to building the film on Sonic’s trenchant, sarcastic (occasionally, mildly annoying) tone. It’s not exactly an innovative technique but it’s one the film holds fast to. In fairness to the film, and Jeff Fowler’s competent direction, moments in the development suggested a film where scenes have been edited out – evidenced best in the sudden appearance of Dr Robotnik, an entire side-plot involving Tom’s antagonistic sister-in-law and the central “friendship” between Tom and Sonic.
So, in lieu of clarity of plot or development, what “Sonic” depends on beyond its interminable speed (the visual effects are fine; they are not earth-shattering but they are sufficient) is an overzealous amount of charm. In ways that seem antithetical to the film. Ben Schwartz’s version of Sonic is aggressively ironic and his sarcasm overrides the film but he is also not the most annoying version of this character we might imagine, so it feels manageable. The human quotient, James Marsden as the affable Sherriff Tom and Tika Sumpter as his even more affable wife play a perfect couple who get swept up in the machinations of Sonic. Their presence is technically inessential to the central thrust of the film but their easy charm is a large percent of what keeps the film firmly below overwrought throughout much of the running time. The two have a winning chemistry that belongs in an easy summer-romantic-comedy, although the best moments in “Sonic” are extraneous moments between the two where they seem committed to creating a domestic comedy-drama that this film isn’t.
On the opposite side of that domestic comedy Sumpter and Marsden are acting in, there is Jim Carrey in particularly zany form as Dr Robotnik working at heroic levels of absurdity. It’s hard to critique whether the performance itself is working effectively but Carrey is so sharply devoted to the ridiculousness of it all the entire unwieldiness of it all ends up feeling charming in spite of itself. By the time the final scene comes, devoted entirely to Carrey, his comedic mugging feels more like a boon than a defect. And it’s well-modulated by the way Marsden’s warmness counters him projecting an air of “reality” to the improbability that’s happening all around.
The film sets up a sequel that threatens to improve on this entry in some ways. Freed from the narration’s need to handhold us, Sonic’s overzealous moods could become more organic and the film’s commitment to its own folly (a mid-film bar fight is its worst sequence but deployed with true bravura) that I’m tentatively curious to see where this goes, if anywhere. This is pure fluff, and it’s likely destined to be forgotten by year’s end. But considering it all, that’s very likely all that “Sonic the Hedgehog” intends to be.
