Ah, the grand tradition of American film adaptations of popular video game franchises!

We have come a long way since the days of “Super Mario Bros.”, the first in a line of critically panned video game movies that includes the “Resident Evil” series, “Silent Hill”, and whatever the heck “Warcraft” was supposed to be. It seemed that the best that fans of franchises could ever get were video-game-adjacent movies like “Tron” or “Wreck-It Ralph”.

Recently, however, there’s been an uptick at least lukewarm reviews for video game movies, with “Detective Pikachu” and “The Angry Birds Movie 2” being 2019’s additions to the canon.

That is not, however, the only context I walked into Jeff Fowler’s “Sonic the Hedgehog” with this weekend. I’m sure almost anyone reading this review remembers the movie’s first trailer. Yeah, that one.

After the Internet (as well as Yuji Naka, the character’s creator) collectively rejected Paramount’s original, toothy, unnervingly muscular character design, months of work by dozens of artists, animators, and assistants were thrown out. The movie’s release date was pushed back to Valentine’s Day 2020, with an updated trailer coming out days after the original release date of November 8, 2019.

However, in spite of all of the talk surrounding “Sonic”, the movie didn’t deliver on either the positive or the negative hype. To quote Jim Carrey’s Dr. Robotnik, “I was not expecting that. But, I was expecting not to expect something, so it doesn’t count.” In this case, the unexpected was how middle of the road the movie ended up being.

Sonic (voiced by Ben Schwartz) is given a background that immediately deviates from the source material, being portrayed as an interplanetary refugee told to “never stop running” by his original guardian. After spending over ten years on Earth, spying on the inhabitants of Green Hills, Montana (a clear reference to the game’s first level), Sonic accidentally reveals himself. After a run-in with the town’s sheriff, Tom Wachowski (James Marsden), leads to the rings Sonic uses to travel being teleported atop the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco, Sonic and Tom must travel there and retrieve them, all the while being pursued by the government in the form of the misanthropic genius Dr. Robotnik.

Positives:

• Jim Carrey’s performance as Robotnik in the movie’s trailers likely would have made this movie a success even without the redesign, and those don’t even do the character justice. Robotnik’s distain for his fellow man is palpable in every scene, and the so-smart-he-sees-everyone-else-as-dumb angle makes the character’s aptitude for robotics at least somewhat believable in a real-world context.
• For all of the pain that it likely caused the movie’s artists, the new Sonic is a drastic improvement over the original design. There were multiple points during my viewing where I paused and tried to imagine the original Sonic in the scene I was watching, and just couldn’t. The voicework by Schwartz, character design, and writing all sold the idea that this Sonic is essentially a young teenager that never got a childhood.
• This is likely a positive for adults watching with children: the movie feels as short as it is. At only an hour and forty minutes, the conclusion of the movie gets there as quickly as the titular character would.

Negatives:

• So many things in this movie feel extremely derivative. The movie begins at the climax before rewinding, which is something that’s never been done before; Sonic’s constant cultural references make it seem sometimes like the writers were going for a PG version of “Deadpool”; the entire road-trip-with-an-alien plot has been done before by 2011’s “Paul”, right down to the bar fight scene; and (speaking of the bar fight scene) the movie includes not one, but two freeze-time sequences that I fully expected a Quicksilver reference from.
• The movie’s central theme of friendship feels completely out-of-the-blue (no pun intended) for the IP. Sonic has always been about defending nature from machinery and standing up for the little guy, but, aside from saving a turtle from being run over, these ideas appear to be of little concern to the movie’s version of the Blue Blur. I wish more had been done in this aspect, as environmental issues are even more relevant now than in 1991, when the first game released.

I also would have liked to see a bit more of Sonic’s world as opposed to the character interacting with Earth. However, the end of the movie also made it apparent that a sequel is likely on the way that would fulfill this wish. Although nothing is official yet, this movie’s portrayals of both Sonic and Robotnik were good enough that I’m interested in what comes next. Consider that my response to one of Sonic’s lines: “Let me know if you want to go Round 2 with the blue.”