I broke down a few weeks back and watched Cats. I couldn’t avoid it any longer. Driven partly by Werner Herzog’s challenge to not “avert my eyes” in response to train-wreck entertainment, I sat through the film to see what I could learn from it. Sadly, I didn’t feel the same kind of ironic pleasure that’s driven the recent Rocky Horror-style “rowdy” screenings. Watching Cats reinforced the idea that just because a movie is unintentionally bad doesn’t always mean it’s paradoxically good.

The movie adaptation of Sega’s classic Sonic games follows this pattern. What’s immediately obvious about Sonic the Hedgehog is that after the disastrous first trailer, the much-publicized re-design the character underwent accomplished one thing: unlike Cats, we can now look at the main character without skin-crawling existential horror. But in making Sonic look more like he does in the games, it only brings the movie out of the depths of “so bad it’s good” and up to merely “meh”. 

The movie is greatly enhanced by one of the most fun performances from Jim Carrey that we’ve had in years. But it still follows the same story beats and character dynamics of any of the myriad of “human actors talk to animated characters” movies we’ve had in the past fifteen years. In fact, with the inclusion of Carrey’s work as Dr. Robotnik, Sonic has a pronounced “90s family film” flavour. But while it may line up with the heyday of the game franchise, it doesn’t make it worth recommending to anyone who isn’t a diehard fan.

Sonic is introduced with one of those “That’s me! You’re probably wondering how I got to be in this situation!” setups that frames most of the movie as a giant flashback. Just like in the games, he’s a three-foot tall, bipedal blue hedgehog who can run real fast. As the action gets under way, Sonic finds himself transported to Earth via a magic ring, and is told to keep himself hidden at all costs. He settles into a small town in Montana and turns into the equivalent of the local Sasquatch, getting to know the residents from the shadows but never making any real connections.

Eventually, Sonic is outed when he gets upset one night and lets out a burst of energy that brings the U.S. military to town. Heading the investigation is Carrey’s Robotnik, and Sonic finds himself teaming up with local sheriff’s deputy Tom Wackowski (James Marsden) to evade capture and find a new home.

The central message of the story - that everyone deserves to feel like they belong somewhere - was pulled off the first page of the Screenwriting for Kids Bible. There’s nothing wrong with it, but in an era when the films nominated for the Best Animated Feature Oscar deal with issues as complex as racism, mental health, job security, and the death of one’s parents, the screenplay for Sonic feels decidedly thin. We can’t blame this one on the character design - the flaw has probably been with the project since the beginning.

The barebones plot exists mostly to prop up a series of speed-based action scenes and gags, like a highway chase involving Robotnik’s drone vehicles and a bar fight scene that gleefully rips off Quicksilver’s famous sequence from X-Men: Days of Future Past. Mercifully, Marsden’s sunny demeanor and Ben Schwartz’s voice work as Sonic don’t make any of this annoying, but it’s also not that fresh or inventive.

Whereas the energy level of Carrey’s work in the 90s was at a 15 on a 10-point scale, here he comes in at a comfortable 9.5 - unpredictable and engaging to watch, but also very much under control. I think I would have preferred it if the majority of the movie took place in an environment pulled from one of the games, with Carrey as the lone human onscreen - more Detective Pikachu than Alvin and the Chipmunks. Of course, that would require a great deal more patience and money than the producers were willing to invest - if the release of the original trailer is any indication - and the results speak for themselves.

Even after the delayed release and extra VFX work, Sonic may yet turn a respectable profit. It’s topped the box office in its opening weekend and could stand unopposed for a few weeks in a quiet February. With its mid-credits scene, the filmmakers make the requisite plea for a sequel, so it’s not hard to see a series develop from this. Even if it does, I’ll be hard-pressed to remember I’ve seen it at all. Sonic the Hedgehog manages to snatch “middling game adaptation” from the jaws of “defective monstrosity”. It’s a win for the reputations of the artists involved, but a loss for people looking for that rare movie that’s interesting for all the wrong reasons.

Sonic the Hedgehog gets two stars out of four.

Stray thoughts

• Is the “mushroom world” seen near the end of the film aiming to link the Super Mario universe to the Sonic movies?

• For a movie about a cartoon hedgehog zipping around at insane speeds, Sonic spends a surprising amount of time in the movie knocked out.

• It would have been a lot funnier if Sonic was known as a video-game character in the human world of the film, and people just mistook him for a cosplayer.