After discovering a small, blue, fast hedgehog, a small-town police officer must help him defeat an evil genius who wants to do experiments on him.
I love Jim Carrey at his wacky, outlandish best: “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective,” “The Mask,” “Liar Liar,” and “Me, Myself & Irene” showcase his hilarious comic abilities and like Robin Williams before him, he is a manic comedian who is at his best when he is not being restrained. With “Sonic the Hedgehog,” he returns in fine form and while he does feel somewhat subdued, his performance is more akin to that of Fletcher Reede in “Liar Liar” than any of his other works, at times, overexcited but for the most part, weird and eccentric.
Sonic is an extraterrestrial blue hedgehog who lives on a distant planet and who can run at supersonic speeds. As the film begins, he is being hunted by a tribe of echidnas as they want to take his power. He is rescued by his mentor, Longclaw the Owl, who opens a portal for him to escape to the planet earth and is told once he arrives to keep a very low profile as earthlings may not be ready for his kind. She gives him a bag of magic rings that can open portals to anywhere in the universe in case he needs to make a speedy escape. As the echidnas are about to attack Longclaw, she closes the portal, saving Sonic in the process.
Years pass and Sonic is living peacefully on earth in the peaceful town of Green Hills, Montana. While he enjoys watching humans from a distance, he misses physical interaction with others as he is by himself. He especially admires the town sheriff, Tom Wachowski (James Marsden), who lives on the outskirts of town with his beautiful wife Maddie (Tika Sumpter), a veterinarian. Tom watches over the town and its people but he longs for the excitement of the big city and has applied for a transfer to the San Francisco Police Department. One night, fed up with his loneliness, Sonic races around the local baseball field at such a high rate of speed, he causes an electromagnetic pulse that knocks out power across the Pacific Northwest. The government enlists the help of Roboticist and scientific genius, Doctor Robotnik (Jim Carrey), to track down the source of the outage.
Tom discovers Sonic outside his house and shoots him with a tranquilizer dart. Before Sonic passes out, he accidentally opens a portal so San Francisco, dropping his bag of rings on top of the Transamerica Pyramid building. Tom then brings him inside his house and after Sonic wakes up, he explains who he is and where he is from. Before Tom has time to comprehend Sonic’s story, Robotnik appears and shoots up the house while trying to capture Sonic. Tom grabs him and they escape in his truck. On the road to San Francisco, where Sonic needs to pick up his bag of rings, he and Sonic formulate a plan to outsmart Robotnik but when Robotnik outsmarts them and turns up with an army of deadly drones, with plans to capture Sonic so he can dissect him in his lab, Sonic opens a portal which takes them back to Green Hills. Once there, Robotnik incapacitates Sonic but Tom and the townsfolk band together to prevent Robotnik from taking him back to his lab, giving Sonic enough time to regain his strength so he can confront Robotnik, one final time!
The movie is aimed squarely at kids but I have to give the filmmakers kudos for actually delivering a more mature version of Sonic and the ensuing narrative. The film could have encompassed silly farting and burping jokes but instead, Sonic, although he is small in stature, is much older than he appears so the humor is more sophisticated with more than enough visual sight gags to keep the kids entertained while Carrey has outbursts of maniacal comedy that will bring out the laughter. I used to play the SEGA video game back in the day and while a lot of video games are getting the big-screen treatment, “Sonic the Hedgehog” lands squarely in the middle, somewhere between “fair to middling” and “a must-see,” in other words, it will help pass the time with a few laughs along the way.
Now available on Digital HD and on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, DVD and for rental on-demand or disc May 19th
