Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ on Amazon Prime, in Which Jim Carrey Walks Off With a Reasonably Amusing Video Game Adaptation

Now on Amazon Prime Video, Sonic the Hedgehog is a white tiger in the wild: a watchable movie based on a video game. The genre has been a boil on the bum of the art of film for decades, dating back to the Super Mario Bros. abomination of 1993, on through a coupla cruddy Mortal Kombats, some deeply underwhelming Tomb Raiders, one mediocre-minus Resident Evil after another and far too many heinous Uwe Boll outings. I’m trying to think of a decent one — does Final Fantasy still hold up OK? What are the chances that anyone ever watched Rampage more than once? Will I ever warm to the annoyances of Detective Pikachu? So hell, the adequately digestible Sonic just might be the best video game movie of all time. The bar is low, my friends.

SONIC THE HEDGEHOG: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Intro: a framing device. I’m gonna skip it. I doubt it’s worth getting into. SO. Once upon a time this thing from space called Sonic the Hedgehog (voice of Ben Schwartz) vworped through a ring-portal from his planet far, far away to Earth, and kept himself hidden from people, because he looked like a cartoon character and everyone else was made out of tangible solid matter. He can run like the dickens, just really really fast, faster than Superman maybe, I dunno, but that might be neat to find out someday if the rights lawyers can sort it out. He lives near Green Falls, Montana, a sleepy burg where the head cop, Tom (James Marsden), sits at a speed trap blasting a turtle with his radar. Sonic likes to eff with the guy, who he calls Doughnut Lord, by blurring past him at 300mph. Tom just shrugs it off and responds to an emergency call about a stolen bagel. The perp is a duck. Are we all quacking up yet?

Sonic spends his days peeping on Tom and his wife Maddie (Tika Sumpter), but in an innocent way because he’s too naive to know it’s creepy, and a lonely way because he considers them friends even though they don’t know he exists. He has a little hole he lives in where he reads Flash comics and plays ping-pong with himself, but it’s not enough. Sonic gets all worked up one night and unwittingly releases a blast of blue energy that blacks out a significant swath of the Pacific Northwest as well as whatever satellites happened to be overhead. People in charge of shit want to know what the crap happened, so they call in a lunatic named Dr. Robotnik (Jim Carrey), who seems like the last guy the U.S. government would hire, but only if you haven’t paid much attention to the workings of the U.S. government.

Sonic knows he’s in trouble, and just as he’s about to vworp through another ring-portal to a mushroom planet, Tom interrupts and tranqs the poor little dude and he loses all his vworping rings, thus obligating Tom to A) accept the fact that Sonic is a hedgehog from space that exists and is not a hallucination, which is alarmingly easy for him, and B) road-trip with Sonic to San Francisco to fetch the rings, which is not at all easy, oh no, because Robotnik is a hyperintelligent maniac who hums Ride of the Valkyries to summon his army of drones to hover by his side and hunt his prey. Chases ensue. Is the plot really that simple? Yes, because this is a Sonic the Hedgehog movie, and if you actually care about Tom’s arc, in which he desires to be more than just a bored cop in a sleepy one-turtle town, you’re watching for all the wrong reasons.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Sonic is less annoying than Detective Pikachu, and far less annoying than The Angry Birds Movie — faint praise, I know, but less so in the context of the genre.

Performance Worth Watching: In a cartoon-off, live-action Carrey clobbers CG Sonic in the opening seconds of round one. His signature facial contortions and screwball line-readings are informed by Daffy Duck now more than ever (well, almost, he said, remembering Fire Marshall Bill). Without him, this movie is a dry pancake.

Memorable Dialogue: Tom: “I’m the Doughnut Lord, you son of a-” (explosions)

Robotnik: “I’m the top banana in a world full of monkeys!”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Carrey is so funny in this movie, you’ll forgive it for otherwise being formula twaddle about the value of companionship and the need to find where you fit in, etc. He enjoys an uproarious sequence in which Robotnik dances to the Poppy Family’s “Where Evil Grows” — an utterly forgotten ’60s psych-pop gem — in his high-tech bad-guy HQ, and it so tremendously melds Carrey’s comic gifts with the character’s deep-seated weirdness, one can’t help but wonder what Sonic might be like if it more frequently embraced such eccentricity.

But alas, this is a medium-large-budgeted family movie based on a popular game franchise, and its appeal therefore must be calculated by conservative marketing algorithms so as not to offer anything too far beyond the target audience’s probable expectations. Art is not the goal, evident by the semi-rampant product placement (beer brand, restaurant chain, etc.) existing just beneath the ubiquitous product placement of the game franchise itself. And so Carrey is given a longish leash while Marsden and the Sonic character provide amiable blandness in the service of medium-exciting action sequences, a few half-assed platitudes and enough source-material integration to keep purists happy. Faint praise? Maybe. But I laughed at it more than I anticipated.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Sonic the Hedgehog is fine! Perfectly fine. Especially for younger viewers. Final tally: 51 funny/49 boring.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Watch Sonic the Hedgehog on Amazon Prime