Yahoo Lifestyle ‘Sonic the Hedgehog 3’ Review: Faster and More Fun Than the Other ‘Sonic’ Movies, with Jim Carrey in an Epic Turn
“Sonic the Hedgehog 3” is wired-up synthetic fun. It’s a trivial kiddie flick that moves at the speed of your mind playing video games. Video-game films seldom have that quality — they tend to be overproduced and lugubrious. But “Sonic 3” gives hyperactivity a good name. Jeff Fowler, who directed all three of these movies, is a quicker and wittier flimflam magician of energy than he was when he made the first “Sonic” in 2020.
“Sonic the Hedgehog 3” is just a vivaciously staged throwaway, but it has a spirit that recalls the elegant tomfoolery of “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” and “Ralph Breaks the Internet.” And it’s anything but mindless. Though it never announces itself in this way, the entire movie — nuclear light shows, plot to blow up the world, a team of heroes fast enough to run circles around physics — is a parody of the grandiosity of what superhero movies have become. It’s like a late Marvel extravaganza that never loses sight of the fact that it’s preposterous.
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The movie skips around in time, with a backstory set 50 years ago, and it surrounds Ben Schwartz’s genial, valiant Sonic, the speed-demon Sega mascot, with enough competing anthropomorphic furballs to keep our sympathies spinning. There are several important new characters, notably Shadow, a red-striped black hedgehog, created from a secret government program, who is set up as Sonic’s revenge-seeking rival. At first that makes you think you aren’t supposed to like him — but Shadow is voiced, by Keanu Reeves, in tones of deepest resonance that draw us into his plight.
And Jim Carrey gets to give an epic performance, topping everything he’s done in these movies. He now plays two characters: the familiar Dr. Ivo Robotnik, a bad guy we know from the inside out, and Robotnik’s grandfather, Gerald Robotnik, who’s like an older version of him (mottled skin, the same distended kielbasa of a mustache, only his is white), but he’s also a more hard-ass, cranky, devious version. This sort of dual performance is something we’ve seen a zillion times (the film makes a meta joke of it), but how perfect it is for Carrey, an actor who is always on some level carrying on a conversation with himself. The interplay between the two Robotniks has a fractious charge that lifts the movie. They’re dueling megalomaniacs, even as poor Ivo thinks he has finally found someone in the world who loves him. As the reality of their relationship emerges, so does the Carrey sarcasm. “Oh, look, a nano-fist,” says Ivo. “I haven’t seen one of those since I hate-watched ‘Green Lantern’ in 2011!”
The plot finds room for the Master Emerald, the super-powered jewel introduced in the last “Sonic” film, and for Tails the fox (Colleen O’Shaughnessey) and Knuckles the echidna (Idris Elba), who are now part of Sonic’s super-critter-hero team. But the real star is Fowler’s shape-shifting filmmaking, which is deft enough to revel in blockbuster overkill and skewer it at the same time.
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