Sonic the Hedgehog (2020)
Directed by Jeff Fowler
Powered with incredible speed, Sonic The Hedgehog embraces his new home on Earth. That is, until Sonic sparks the attention of super-uncool evil genius Dr. Robotnik. Now it’s super-villain vs. super-sonic in an all-out race across the globe to stop Robotnik from using Sonic’s unique power for world domination.
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34 films that influenced Sonic the Hedgehog
What critics say influenced Sonic the Hedgehog
Sonic the Hedgehog is The screenplay by Patrick Casey and Josh Miller has a few funny lines and references for adults, i.e. when Sonic spies on Tom and his wife while they watch Speed.
He learns human behavior by watching action movies, so his idea of life on earth is informed by "Speed" and the "Fast and the Furious" saga.
Sonic hides out near the local sheriff, Tom Wachowski (James Marsden), and his wife (Tika Sumpter), essentially acting like their invisible child as they relax at home and have movie nights where they watch films like Speed and The Naked Gun.
Gamely voiced by comedian Ben Schwartz (perhaps best known for playing Jean-Ralphio in TV's Parks and Recreation ), Sonic makes a cutely cartoonish hero as we find him alone on Earth, forced to watch his favourite movie ( Speed – what else?) through other folks' windows.
When the couple sit down to watch Speed —subtle!—there’s Sonic watching from the outside of their living room window.
He observes them from a distance, becoming an invisible part of their routines, such as watching TV reruns of Keanu Reeves in Speed – natch.
Uwe Boll’s filmography notwithstanding, you might have to go all the way back to 1993’s “Super Mario Bros.” to find such a striking disconnect between the experience of playing something at home and watching it in a theater.
Likewise, I reckon, the utterly deranged – and now very cult 1993 movie – Super Mario Brothers , with Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo tearing it up as the plumbers who just want to save the world, while the batrachoid Dennis Hopper tries to destroy time and space itself.
Really, though, a Lovecraftian monster might have made this movie more interesting, because the adaptation of the long-running Sega video game series is a dull, predictable family movie that borrows heavily from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and ALF , turning Sonic into an alien who’s taken refuge on Earth.
He’s certainly the best thing in the movie, which is otherwise pretty standard “family” fare in the low-rent “E.T.” mode.
Think "E.T." in running shoes.
Jeff Fowler and Paramount build a very serviceable amalgam of entertainment and action that invokes a lot of the classics like “ET” in interesting albeit vague shades here and there.
The plot isn’t too far from the classic “ET” or the more modern “Bumblebee” — an alien lands on Earth to hide and soon must team up with a kindly human (James Marsden, in a very Marsden groove) to escape the clutches of evil government scientists who want to dissect it.
Suffering from Masters of the Universe syndrome, the writers Pat Casey and Josh Miller downshift from the opening sequence, set in the familiar loop-de-loop world of the Genesis game, to a mundane buddy-comedy routine set on Earth.
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El trabajo de Schwartz cumple, aunque en ocasiones se siente un poco como la versión PG de Deadpool , y sus referencias a la cultura pop del momento no ayudarán a que la película envejezca con gracia.
Fowler, along with co-writers Patrick Casey and Josh Miller, is working off the Deadpool and Detective Pikachu template, which is really just the Ryan Reynolds template.
It’s like watching a family-friendly version of Deadpool but with a hyperactive hedgehog that never stops irritating viewers and dropping second-rate jokes.
Friends, this is a record-scratch, freeze-frame, “I bet you’re wondering how I got here” sort of movie, with a voiceover (by Ben Schwartz, as Sonic) that indicates above all how much movie executives have learned from Deadpool ’s box office returns.
What is the target audience for a film that wants to take its cues from Deadpool but also family films about the Easter Bunny?
Sonic is produced by Neal H. Moritz, whose Original Film banner helped create Fast & Furious , 21 Jump Street , xXx and the TV series Prison Break.
More like sequences where Sonic shellshocks a turtle by letting him “burn rubber” for once, or pop culture references to Fast & Furious movies, or the film’s bountiful Olive Garden references (seriously, that product placement probably paid for Sonic 2.0).
The George Lucas-produced, Willard Huyck-directed Howard the Duck from 1986, that’s what, and it feels like more people are realizing this with each passing day.
The Olive Garden product placement is far from subtle and reminiscent of the product placement of McDonald's in the dreadful and cringe-inducing Mac and Me.
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Because while Sonic the Hedgehog is cut from the same bland mold as Garfield (2004), Alvin and the Chipmunks (2007), and The Smurfs (2011), the one thing besides the little blue fur ball that feels most like a relic of the Clinton years is Jim Carrey.
Scriptwriters Patrick Casey and Josh Miller breezily steer Sonic down well-mapped odd-couple and chase-movie highways, with Alvin and the Chipmunks and Easter comedy Hop (also starring Marsden) as signposts.
Live-action comedies which rely overtly on pint-sized CGI mascots don’t exactly have a great standing among audiences or critics – just look at Alvin and the Chipmunks or The Smurfs – but Sonic the Hedgehog is aided enormously by the charmingly daft personality of Sonic himself.
Director Jeff Fowler is making his directorial debut here after having worked on the visual effects for films like “Where the Wild Things Are.” His best moments are when he breaks free from the film’s plot and has fun with the idea of Sonic.
But Jeff Fowler had an animation research job on “Where the Wild Things Are,” so he’s just happy to be here.
Sonic the Hedgehog features the directorial debut of Jeff Fowler, an animator whose credits include Where the Wild Things Are and a number of other projects as part of his company, Blur Studios, which he co-owns with Tim Miller, who recently directed Terminator: Dark Fate .
Newbie director Jeff Fowler (he was a visual effects artist and developer on Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are ) orchestrates the action rather well, a mid-movie set piece involving an escaping Sonic and Wachowski being chased by one of Dr. Robotnik’s massive robotic machines both imaginative and thrilling at the same time.