I’m gonna be real with y’all: The success of the Sonic the Hedgehog film series still continues to baffle me, all of these years later. It now rivals the Resident Evil franchise for the most-successful video game to screen adaptation, being the last major box-office success before COVID came along and annihilated the business for a full year and a half, as well as a primary piece of “quarantainment” gorged upon by families and bored adults in the immediate aftermath of the content dearth. It was Not Bad, released at the right moment for many to confuse it for Good, and, of course, it spawned a sequel, given that market forces demanded it. After all, there are just so many characters one can introduce in a Sonic sequel. Well, make that two characters: The entire reason that Jeff Fowler’s Sonic the Hedgehog 2 exists, on a narrative level, is to birth Tails the Fox and Knuckles into the live-action Sonic universe, and I would give approximately $20 to be temporarily teleported to a universe where those characters were designed in the same vein as Sonic was originally. They would have looked absolutely horrifying, and it would have been awesome (perhaps they’d have flying cars and replicators like they do in Star Trek: The Next Generation, with the Sonic redesign being the point of divergence between us and a post-scarcity society). But we’re stuck in this world, after all, and what we’ve been given in Sonic 2 is more of the same. If you’re me, that’s kind of a bad thing, but if you’re one of those folks who discovered Sonic in, say, May 2020, you might be pleased with the results, unless you find yourself paying to see it without it being bundled in your Hulu subscription.
Sonic 2 picks up where you think it would: Dr. Robotnik/Eggman (Jim Carrey), whose name is either depending on the scene, is still trapped on Mushroom World after his misadventures with the blue hedgehog in the last film, trying to find a way back to Earth while also seeking to make the best form of mushroom-based coffee that he can. He manages to make an energy burst from one of Sonic’s quills, which summons Knuckles (Idris Elba), a warrior from a tribe of Echinedas on the Hedgehog’s home planet, and the pair decide to team up in order to fulfill their various goals: Eggman wants to kill Sonic (though one wonders why Carrey didn’t go full “What’s Opera, Doc?” and sing “Kill the Hedgehog” to Wagner), and Knuckles wants to get his gloved hands on the Master Emerald, which is basically the One Ring and the Infinity Gauntlet if it were merged into the most boring possible form. Meanwhile, back on Earth, Sonic (Ben Schwartz) is having those growing pains — he wants to be a superhero, but his adopted dad (James Marsden) doesn’t want him causing chaos in the name of justice, leading to a whole lot of “You’re not my dad!” shit. But when the villains come a-calling, Sonic’s gotta team up with another extradimensional creature in order to stop them, that being Tails the Fox (Colleen Ann O’Shaughnessey), a genius inventor who also can fly like a helicopter with his two tails. So, yeah: Two villains, two heroes. This is a sequel, after all, and they’ve got to cram all that they can into the 122-minute runtime, which feels as bloated as it seems.
The tension between the needs of the intended audiences — children, mid-30s nerds still obsessed with Sonic, and a trans-Pacific audience looking for different things from a film about a hedgehog who’s gotta go very fast — remains unsolved, though Fowler and his screenwriters do make an attempt at trying to please each of them. Unlike his western cartoon counterpart or the faux-badass that the character is in the Japanese video games, Schwartz remains at a precarious balance between deeply irritating and occasionally interesting as the headlining hedgehog, with his quips coming off as a shallow echo of a decent Spider-Man impression, albeit one that’s way more reliant on pop culture knowledge than Peter Parker’s knowingly-goofy banter. Tails, as performed by O’Shaughnessy (who voices him in the games), is remarkably bland, with the earnestness endemic to this kind of voice work being an ill-fitting attempt to add anime-style whole-heartedness to an enterprise to a fundamentally post-modern western perspective. But at least they cast Idris Elba right, at least when he’s allowed to perform the role in a more comedic manner — he’s deliberately echoing the kind of dynamic seen in the Thor films, where a serious warrior-creature is tossed into a flippant society, and his goofiness slowly becomes endearing as he inevitably makes the transition from tenuous villain to Sonic’s red-quilled best bud. He’s probably the best example of a possible balance that could be had between these varying wants from the crowd, but it’s still too little, too late.
Only Knuckles’ characterization insulates Elba from the branded flippancy that make Sonic 2 such a frustrating experience, and that problem doesn’t just stop with the cartoons.They are still a strange fusion of live-action realism and stylized video game character design (though not as spine-tinglingly horrifying as they could have been, to the world’s eternal loss), and it extends to the live-action characters as well. Carrey is, once again, working his manic best to try and make things much more fun than they would be otherwise, with his performance as the now-deranged Eggman landing somewhere between The Grinch and The Riddler on the sliding scale of his prior performances. When he’s leaning into the bizarre madness of the character he’s crafted (which bears little resemblance to the Dr. Robotnik that ’90s kids grew up with on the Saturday morning cartoon), it succeeds as intended, and the moments that he and Elba share — mirroring the “fish out of water” dynamic between Marsden and Schwartz in the first film — are occasionally funny, including one scene in which Knuckles, trapped on a cliffside and preparing to fight the villain’s drones, discovers that they’ve simply formed a path for him to climb back up to solid ground: “Ah, they’re… stairs.” But, immediately following that moment, worth a slight chuckle, Carrey flosses (the Fortnite dance, not dental hygiene), and we’re back to square one. As for the rest of the live-action crew, they’re basically afterthoughts, plugged into their seemingly algorhythmically-generated roles. It’s Carrey and the critters’ show, and there’s not much room for them otherwise.
What’s funny is that, within what little room exists between the CGI chili dogs and the screenwriters’ attempts to make Sonic lore anything other than just goofy excuses for fun video game levels, there are signs of a mediocre but fun family film that exists within Sonic 2. There’s an amusing sequence where Marsden attends his sister-in-law’s wedding in Hawaii and causes havoc, and after he derails the ceremony by helping Sonic and Tails teleport there, along with a whole bunch of snow from an avalanche they’re trying to escape, every member of the wedding party reveals themselves to be a federal agent, trying to catch Sonic. The groom, the caterers, even the officiant (who opens his bible to reveal a gun): all are there for this goofy purpose, and her stunned reaction to this too-good-to-be-true occasion falling apart is genuinely amusing. But then we cut back to Adam Pally making Ghostbusters references, or Sonic starts blathering on about how the Rock and Vin Diesel are just like the Echidnas and the Owls or whatever, and it becomes another try-hard attempt at cashing in on the MCU’s banter, which is already beginning to wear thin even in their own products.
I still think a somewhat catastrophic blunder like Sonic’s original design would have made these films inherently more interesting, especially with how generic everything feels as a capital-F Franchise Film experience, but I guess this is just what the people want: Two snail-paced hours of characters saying that they’ve gotta go fast, interspersed with allusions to more organically-memorable movies, with the occasionally funny bit or decent performance keeping them awake. And, once again, it ends with a lovely CGI recreation of the film’s story within the world and with the lovely aesthetic of the video games, which only serves to remind one how much more fun you’d have had if you’d just stayed hope and pulled out Sonic World or something.