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.
