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‘Sonic The Hedgehog’ Review: An Exhausting Video Game Adaptation With An Identity Crisis

Why is sonic the hedgehog movie narrated

Video Why is sonic the hedgehog movie narrated

who is sonic the hedgehog for? who is the target audience for a film that wants to be inspired by deadpool but also family movies about the easter bunny? Apparently, kids should really want to see this movie adaptation of Sega’s long-running video game about an extremely fast blue animal. but sonic the hedgehog can’t tell if its audience is the parents of those kids, those of us who grew up with the first iteration of sonic, or the kids themselves. the result is what may be one of the last acts of a desperate movie studio, so determined to mine intellectual property for all it’s worth and unable to realize that it’s hit rock bottom.

The plot of sonic is understandably silly. As a young man, Sonic is told by his surrogate mother, a protective owl, to hide in the ground (because… sure, why not), so the faceless bad guys don’t capture him and take away the power built into each of them. one of its blue beaks. . Sonic lives in peace, but with increasing loneliness, for a decade on Earth in a small mountain town called Green Hills. Sonic hides out near the local sheriff, Tom Wachowski (James Marsden) and his wife (Tika Sumpter), essentially acting as their invisible son as they relax at home and have movie nights where they watch movies like speed. i > and the naked weapon. (Don’t insert highly entertaining movie clips into the movie you’re making. The last thing you want is to remind me that I could be watching something better right now.)

eventually, sonic’s loneliness gets the better of him and he inadvertently causes a massive power outage. this alerts the us government to something strange in the Pacific Northwest, which leads them (for no good reason, as the movie admits) to call in the very strange and very smart Dr. robotnik (jim carrey) to investigate. Robotnik quickly reveals himself to be power-mad and insane, and hell-bent on catching Sonic. So it’s up to Tom and Sonic to escape from his clutches and get Sonic off the ground as fast as possible.

sonic the hedgehog made a lot of unwanted headlines last year when its first trailer was released and the online world was understandably horrified by what the cg version of sonic looked like. Paramount Pictures went to great lengths after the initial smear and scorn, delaying the film’s release for a few months and trying to fix the problem. So here’s the good news: Sonic no longer seems like the kind of nightmare fuel that came straight out of the recent cats adaptation. The CG is never quite believable: Marsden, as talented as an actor as he is, sometimes seems to be looking a foot over Sonic’s head when he interacts with the blue guy, but he’s not horrible.

The difficulty with this movie is its frequent humor or its desperate attempts to be funny. It is due to lack of talent, of course. Fans of Ben Schwartz’s performance as Jean-Ralphio on Parks and Recreation, or his many appearances on the comedy podcast Bang Bang, may have high hopes that are quickly dashed. his sonic talks a mile a minute, narrating his story with a snarky, hip vibe that’s been there that reflects what happens when a fight room full of comedy writers goes to great lengths to get at least one of them. . -liners in the script. (Worse: Adam Pally, Schwartz’s onetime late-night talk show partner, appears as a fellow Montana cop and barely manages a single laugh.)

Carrey performs a little better, in his first major role in more than five years. But even the maniacal Dr. Robotnik feels less like an actual character, and more like the studio is saying, “Well, we paid Jim Carrey a lot of money, so let him do what he wants, to hell with the consequences.” let’s put it this way: if you like jim carrey’s work and want to see him play a weird bad guy in a family movie released by paramount pictures, watch lemony snicket, a series of unfortunate events, a movie very underrated. indeed.

sonic the hedgehog is a movie that references the olive garden twice, and does so without a wink at the camera. I could start and end the review with that sentence, because what else do you need to know? or you will enjoy a movie that not only connects the olive garden, but has two characters quoting its catchphrase, and another character complicit in one of its menu items without quoting 30 rock and staring at the camera, asking “can we have our money now?” humor is subjective, of course. you can enjoy the preponderance of pop culture references in this movie non-stop, even during the action sequences. you can laugh, for example, when some of dr. robotnik’s drones attack tom’s house, sonic tries to knock one to the ground and yells “can you believe amazon wanted to deliver packages with these?”

but I say that sonic the hedgehog is exhausting. here’s a movie that refuses to stop making jokes, somehow achieving the unique feat of never making any of those jokes funny. Marsden and Carrey are as good as you can get in a movie like this, in part because there’s always a different look in their eyes that communicates a weary sense of awareness that it’s come to this. (how the hell is it that, after his hilarious supporting role in enchanted, marsden has been given roles like “straight guy to a talking blue hedgehog?”) sonic the hedgehog fixed your cgi. so yeah, this could have been worse. but when this movie was delayed, they should have spent three more months on the script.

/movie score: 3 out of 10

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