Sonic the Hedgehog 3 – REVIEW

Still from Sonic the Hedgehog 3


It’s been fascinating to see these movies become underdog stories. It’s been over five years now since that truly awful trailer of the first Sonic the Hedgehog movie released, with that nightmarish original design for Sonic embedded itself into our minds. Now, two movies and a spin-off streaming series later, it’s hard to believe that one design change brought the franchise up to this. Sonic the Hedgehog and its 2022 sequel are pure family fun. Some groan-worthy bits thrown in occasionally, but that’s to be expected. They’re largely movies for kids and families, that’s gonna come with it, but with this new installment, a good amount of that “family movie” façade is mostly (intentionally) stripped back. In the third installment, Team Sonic has a new enemy to face: a mysterious experiment called Shadow, who’s broken out of military unit G.U.N's containment to enact his revenge on G.U.N. from a tragedy 50 years earlier. Obviously I’m leaving out major plot points, but that’s the gist. It’s very refreshing to see that the “video game movie” label being equal to a bad movie is slowly being pulled out of the collective consciousness. However, for every adaptation like The Last of Us, there’s always a Borderlands, so that label is still a thing. Seeing the response to this out of the first weekend proves this: Adapting what the fans want to see (Sonic Adventure 2, in this case) proves that fans will show up for it. It also helps that Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is the best family movie of the year. The big addition is Shadow, voiced by Keanu Reeves. He’s the main reason for this being more serious than the previous entries, and it’s great to see the parallels of Sonic and Shadow’s character come to life with care from director Jeff Fowler, who’s previously worked on the beloved Shadow spin-off game. The mass appeal of the first two films, Jim Carrey’s Dr. Robotnik, returns and not arguably has the most screen time out of every character, but is probably one of best comedic performances of his career. It’s something that could've been released in that hot streak of Ace Ventura, The Mask, and Dumb and Dumber. The sillier human B-plots from the last two movies are absent too, even if they were fun little reprieves from the more groan-worthy moments. I don’t miss them, though, because there aren’t any of those eye-rolling scenes here. It’s honestly an impressive feat. What’s also impressive are the effects, especially for the main characters. They’re surprisingly refined for a massive blockbuster these days, so it’s worth mentioning for that alone. Really the only drawback here is that Sonic can get comically annoying, and that stayed true for this one. If you don’t like constant quips, one-liners, and meta references, that’s most of the comedy. Either way, Sonic 3 is a massive winner. Bring on the fourth.


Ryan’s Grade: A-