SONIC THE HEDGEHOG 2

Stars: Jim Carrey, James Marsden, Tika Sumpter, Natasha Rothwell, Shemar Moore, Adam Pally and Lee Majdoub.
Featuring the voices of: Ben Scwartz, Idris Elba and Collen O'Shanussy.
Writers: Pat Casey, Josh Miller and John Whittington
Director: Jeff Fowler

Rating: ★ ★ ½

It’s been a scant 23 months since the Sonic the Hedgehog movie came out. Who can forget the whirlwind of fan disgust when the first glimpse of the speedy blue Eulipotyphla (not ‘rodent’, as I learnt today) hit the web, forcing a hasty redesign, and the subsequent whirlwind of fan glee when the film turned out to be pretty good. On the back of a well-told tale of family values and good-vs-evil and a cartoonishly villainous turn by Jim Carrey, rediscovering his ‘Ace Ventura’ wackiness, Sonic The Hedgehog took $320million worldwide - a legit blockbuster, considering COVID cut it’s run short in some territories.

With two years of pandemic-impacted box office revenue to catch up on, Paramount Pictures rushed into production on this sequel to their last pre-plague hit. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 reunites all the major creatives, including director Jeff Fowler, Carrey as megalomaniac Dr Robotnik, Ben Schwartz voice-acting Sonic, James Marsden as the human element, and all below-the-line effects talent that brought Sonic to life the first time around.

New characters in the adaptation mix are Tails, the ‘flying fox’ (Collen O'Shanussy) who was glimpsed at the end of the first film and who lands in Sonic’s hometown of Green Hills Montana, just as things are about to turn dangerous for our spiky hero. In a pre-credit sequence set on the Mushroom Planet, the banished Robotnik aligns with red-hued tough guy Knuckles the Echidna (Idris Elba) to get back to Earth, promising to deliver Sonic while fiendishly scheming to purloin the all-powerful Green Emerald and see out his plans for world domination.

There’s a lot in there that fans of the game, which debuted 31 years ago and has been a Sega cash-cow ever since, will recognise and appreciate, and Fowler and his writing team fill the screen with easter eggs to keep their attention. What they don’t fill the screen with is any of the charm or laughs that made the first film a happy diversion for non-gamers. Instead, Paramount have pushed their spiky teen hero into an MCU-style ‘end of the world’ effects extravaganza, banishing to the periphery all that was engaging about the first film in favour of rote heroics and tired CGI.

It is also runs an unforgivable 122 minutes, the length blown out by time wasted in a Serbian bar watching Sonic win a dance contest and a frantic and unfunny ‘Hawaiin wedding gone wrong’ set piece, featuring Natasha Rothwell as a shrill ‘African-American bridezilla’ caricature. Notably, neither sequence features Carrey, who is absent for long passages and/or called upon to play straight man to Knuckles, thereby robbing the film of its strongest comedic asset.

And poor Sonic, the cocky teenager occasionally called upon to be the plucky superhero, is dwarfed by the ill-fitting scale of his own movie, often all but disappearing amidst the mayhem. In the inevitable Sonic the Hedgehog 3, not so subtly hinted at in the final moments of #2, just give the franchise back to the simple charms of its titular hero.