After Sonic the Hedgehog gave us a live action version of the classic character back in 2020 most people thought “yeah, it was fine” and now in 2022 we have a sequel.
With the gimmick of a live action Sonic now spent, where does this sequel go? As you’ve no doubt seen in the trailers and other promotional material, it adds in Knuckles (voiced by Idris Elba, of all people) and Tails (voiced by Colleen O’Shaughnessey) who was also teased in an after credits scene of the original movie.
The McGuffin of the movie is also the famous Chaos Emeralds which does just about everything a powerful McGuffin can do.
So do these additions make this new movie a step up from the original? Not really as we found ourselves bored most of the time in this film, but let’s start with how everything looks.
The original movie had the infamous first reveal of Sonic which looked closer to a Eldritch horror than a fun blue cartoon character. This was changed and that design has been carried over here, but most other things in this movie simply don’t look good.
A big selling point and the entire reason these movies exist is because they’re supposed to be live action, but most of the time everything we’re looking at on the screen is entirely CGI.
We know that heavy reliance on CGI is a problem seen in the entire movie industry and it’s a necessity when your main characters literally don’t exist in the real world, but most scenes here look so fake and flat that we’re once again pining for an animated Sonic adventure instead.
Things get even worse here when the real actors are on screen as it’s very clear that they’re on a green screen. Even scenes which appear to be set in a real location seem to have this fake sheen over them and we wouldn’t be surprised if more parts than we believe were actually all done digitally.
The real cast here is the next big problem. Listen, we love Jim Carrey, but he was simply irritating in this movie. Sure he’s doing the same over the top nonsense that made Carrey famous, but what he has to say and do here is not appealing.
The rest of this cast falls into this category too but we won’t mention them as they’re barely in this movie.
The animated characters are voiced well, however, and we really have no complaints for them. Everyone did their job well and Elba, O’Shaughnessey and Ben Schwartz as Sonic were all great. O’Shaughnessey is likely the standout and it’s clear that a veteran of the voice acting space did so well with this role.
The characters are let down massively here by the writing. There’s a lot of fun jokes and deep cuts into Sonic fandom, but these are all padded by vein pop culture references and toilet humour – there’s an extended fart joke right near the start of the movie too that leaves a bad taste in your mouth and sits there for the entire run time.
At just over two hours Sonic the Hedgehog 2 may seem short compared to three plus hour juggernauts like The Batman, but this movie desperately needed some rewrites to make things more interesting and cut out the fluff.
This is dying to be a strict 90 minute movie. Hell even shorter than that – make it 90 minutes including the credits.
There’s an entire B-plot in this movie that is painful to sit through and kills the momentum of the entire experience and once this movie releases – 1st April in South Africa and Europe, 8th April in the US – we expect to see a lot of discussion online about how boring and wasteful a good 50 percent of this movie is.
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is a movie made for YouTube. By this we mean that, in a few months when it’s available on streaming, some enterprising individuals will cut out the best parts and post them online.
It really is a series of some bright, fun moments strung together with unappetising filler and boredom in CGI form.
With all that in mind, we do still want to give it credit as a good movie for the kids. We know calling something “good for kids” is sometimes a dirty phrase as it’s better to simply make good content that also appeals to kids, but the younger people in the audience can forgive a lot of the harsh words we wrote above.
We saw this movie with two kids unfamiliar with the Sonic games and they liked the new (to them), colourful characters in Knuckles and Tails quite a lot, and they were surprised by the Chaos Emeralds and what they did.
It’s a reminder that any new piece of media in a long franchise may also be the first or second experience for a new generation and there is merit in that.
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is a movie most will forget about a few days and even a few hours after seeing it, but it may leave an impression on newcomers and the sparse fun moments claws back some much needed points for this movie.
