The Wandering Fox Reviews: Sonic the Hedgehog 3

Written by The Wandering Fox

Freddy: Well this is quite the essay.

Teddy: Yeah, didn’t the Media Man say it’s redundant because he reviewed it.

Yeah he did, but I explained to him that Doctor Who TV, the website, lets it’s members do reviews of episodes to give their own opinions. I thought it’d be nice to give my own opinion on the movie we watched, cos I know Sonic 3 is liked by a lot of people and is a big talking point in our group of friends.

Teddy: I see. Will you be needing the Cynical Crown for this?

Maybe. I’ll see.

Hey everybody, it’s me, you know, the fox, the guy who checks in now and then, I’m here once more with my thoughts on Sonic the Hedgehog 3 movie. You all know by now I have a very odd relationship with these movies. I thought the first one was not as bad as I thought it was and the second was almost perfect save for that horrific wedding scene while Maddie stole Tails’ moment. For the third movie, well, I’m here to divulge my thoughts on this. I do recall being excited for it with Shadow being in it, the thought of seeing Gerald and Maria brought to life with the utter tragedy of them would make a good turning point for the movies and I was hoping they’d round out the trilogy with an ending that starts a whole new era. I watched it upon its release and well...let’s see.

The movie picks up a while after Sonic the Hedgehog 2 with Shadow escaping from Prison Island upon somebody hacking into it to release him, thus GUN hires Sonic, Tails and Knuckles to go and bring him in, but quickly they see things aren’t what they think and soon they are fugitives of GUN and must do battle with both Shadow, Robotnik and Gerald. Now, as a synopsis I quite like this. It makes sense in this universe to do the cliché of GUN hiring Sonic and co to help them until Sonic finds out GUN aren’t being honest with him, thus GUN now wants his head, and in the end Sonic discovers a horrid truth of what happened to Shadow while wrestling with his own emotions come the lives of his loved ones endangered, creating a mirror dynamic of him and Shadow. That’s good. Execution? Uh, yeah.

Let’s see what works in regards to the plot and its characters.

I think the movie does improve on a few things from the second movie, in which Tails is given a bigger role and isn’t moved to the background like he was in the previous film, being him more hands on in the action. You know me, I love Tails with him being my favourite Sonic character, so seeing this with him was a lot more rewarding compared to the second. I was smiling like crazy when Knuckles threw him out into space to save Sonic and though Tails couldn’t get to him, the fact is Tails showed he is really brave and loves Sonic that much he’s more than willing to risk his own life for him. He even gets a moment where he humiliates Shadow by flushing him out of the River Thames. His conversation with Agent Stone also shows that Tails is far more impactful with just being who he is: a sweet, kind hearted boy who knows fully well what his friendship with Sonic is, he’s his friend, not a underling, which gives Agent Stone food for thought of his own place with Robotnik and has him try to convince him Gerald is not going to give Robotnik what he wants. Tails here just shows he’s got just as big of a impact on others as Sonic does.

Shadow here is quite good with how he’s done. With the story it’s adapting and this being for the big screen, he’s more emotive in certain scenes like his flashbacks with Maria, his rage at being hunted and his aloofness towards Sonic’s tries at helping him for he’s helping GUN, while we get a clever look at how he has this moment of regret upon badly hurting Tom, whom he mistook for Commander Walters. From the animation showing his body language and facial expressions to Keanu Reeves’ voice shifting into surprise at what he did, it’s well done. To me the best we get of Shadow are his flashbacks with Maria where, while he’s still uncertain about what the humans are doing to him, he quite likes Maria and ends up playing with her, be it he’s taking her for a ride on her roller skates, watching movies, the star scene, you can see he truly loved Maria and was thankful she was treating him like he was a person, not a thing. We get that moment in which Shadow feels uncomfortable watching a monster movie which has an alien being a baddie which Maria notices and cheers him up. I think what could’ve at least made him feel better in that regard is if Maria showed him some Superman comics or played a bit of Jon Pertwee’s Doctor Who for him in explaining though these guys look human, they’re aliens and heroes so not everybody on Earth sees aliens as monsters, but that’s just what I would’ve done. I can’t stop talking about Shadow if I don’t mention his super form, he gets a great scene in which he turns super and he looks great in the film with the golden white colour and how he gets a few licks on Super Sonic before they finally stop on the moon. I hope Shadow is treated with more respect going forward than Knuckles, as there’s still more to his story to be told. Jeff, don’t do a spin off where he is hardly in it and it’s about Wade the Loser.

Maria as well is pretty good here. I think she has a bit more to her character. Don’t get me wrong, she’s good in the games, but I feel like the movie gave her more of a personality beyond the nice girl she is, like her own sense of fun, her first meeting with Shadow was cute, and her efforts to make him happy is really sweet and makes you see just how much she meant to him. I know there’s been a lot of discussion regarding the fact they removed her illness and altered her death scene. While I think they did the right thing in not having her getting shot, I feel her illness should have been kept in and served as a more tethering anchor to both Shadow and Gerald, but I’ll come back to that soon. So yeah, Maria is fine.

I think the only other lot of characters I can really praise are Sonic and Agent Stone. I like how Sonic is a bit more willing to talk things out before jumping in to fight as it shows he’s becoming more like the hedgehog we know in the games, his empathetic side showing well as he looks through the lab where Shadow once lived in and sees he had others he cared for, then we get his brush with anger as he wants to get back at Shadow for hurting Tom and getting angry at Tails and Knuckles. Shadow himself making Sonic see he’s just being like him was good and brought Sonic back to being who he was and makes it up to Tails and Knuckles. With Agent Stone, I like how he’s grown a bit of a spine thanks to Tails and tries to argue with Robotnik that Gerald shouldn’t be trusted, the ending of the movie giving him a final chapter as he accepts Robotnik is gone and goes to live on with his life. Though let’s be real, if Robotnik is back in the fourth movie, Agent Stone will be with him.

That’s where my positives for the characters end.

For the plot there’s things in there that do work.

I know people are annoyed we didn’t get the ARK as a place of safety for Maria due to her illness and Shadow was not created by Gerald and Black Doom, but in this universe I’m fine with it. You gotta remember that back then the space race was still going on and with what was available back then we didn’t have the technology to build a space station, nor did we have the ability to create artificial lifeforms as well as Shadow, so here the changes to his backstory are understandable.

GUN having a bit of a iffy team-up with Sonic makes sense as well, with them being the closest humans aside from Tom and Maddie that know him and his friends, they’re bound to want to get them to do some work in return for being quiet of their lives.

This will be worth mentioning as the film was affected by the SAG-AFTRA strikes which saw actors associated with the American film industry on protest. My opinion is that I think this helped the movie a lot because this let the filmmakers continue working on the digital side of things as we know they had Sonic, Tails and Knuckles’ models being filmed while the strike was going on. This benefitted the movie from not having Tom and Maddie involved as much. I like as well how Rachel doesn’t really appear with it being Maddie in disguise as her, cos Rachel is such an annoying character I’d like to think both the protests and the backlash to the wedding scene in the sequel forced Jeff Fowler to cut her out. Those bits of the film are good enough for me and lets us focus on the Sonic characters instead.

The actors do a good job as well, Ben, Colleen, and Idris still got it as Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles, James Marsden shows as well he’s well in the character of Tom which is good and he doesn’t look like he’s bored out of his brains talking to a figurine, Keanu Reeves was decent as Shadow, if he had more scenes I think he’d be superb, that’s not on him though. Jim Carrery…eh, I’ll get to him. Krysten Ritter was good for her more mature scenes in the movie. Aaaaaaaaaaaand. That’s it.

But sadly that’s where my praise for the film ends.

Teddy: Here’s the Cynical Crown.

I won’t wear it, I’ll just stick it on my lap.

Now, this is where I sadly have to get really blunt with you. I think this movie fumbled the bag a lot on certain stuff. I’m going to start with the egg in the room:

Jim Carrey.

I was really annoyed by him. I think Jeff Fowler’s spine collapsed when it came to him as Jim got way too much power in this movie, the fact they printed him a contract in gold ink to get him back is ridiculous. While Jim had more of a menace to him as Robotnik on the first two movies, here he just gave up and went full Jim Carrey. It’s like Catherine Tate on the “60th anniversary” Doctor Who stories: she was hardly playing Donna, just going full Catherine Tate. The fact he’s playing Gerald as well didn’t help as he hardly acted like Gerald. This is Gerald Robotnik, a softly spoken kind man who’s mind and heart were ruined by Maria’s death and became a angrier guy who was devoted to revenge. But instead Jim Carrey approached him like he was a old nineties character he played be it that stupid dance scene in the corridor, his false teeth falling out or that pathetic “fight” scene between him and Robotnik. I don’t know if they got Jim to play Robotnik and Gerald to save money, but if I was Jeff, I would’ve told Jim “You’re ACTING, Jim! You’re Gerald Robotnik! Act like him, don’t be yourself!” Or that bonding montage which was just Jim Carrey being silly and took the entire film out, betraying Gerald’s character, hence once it came to Gerald’s “You’re no Maria” scene, it just felt hollow. I don’t buy that this guy is Gerald if he’s just a big clown Jim Carrey is playing. If Robotnik is back in the fourth movie, Jeff needs to get his spine back in place and tell Jim to do as he’s told and act like Robotnik. Oh and Robotnik himself has lost that earlier edge to him from the first two movies, instead acting more like a sad child who yearns for his family when we didn’t have that in the first two movies. If they wanted to at least go with the idea that Robotnik wanted revenge for the deaths of his family then they should’ve at least dons the familial goals more in the first two movies but no.

Then we get to the film’s tone. It felt like the film couldn’t make its mind up on what it wanted. It was too frightened to be mature but it wanted to try to be truer to Shadow, hence what we got was a mess. By mature I don’t mean “Blood, guns, swearing” I mean just being a bit more mature in the sense of how Shadow’s story shouldn’t have these goofy bits that take you out of the movie and it kinda serves as a bump for Shadow himself who needed more scenes. If it was him going into the London GUN base instead of that dumb dance scene, that would’ve made for a great fight scene and showed just how brutal he and Gerald could be in wanting the ARK. But instead we get treated to out of touch tonal shifts be it Wade the Loser treating the Master Emerald as a hockey puck right after Tom’s been injured and we’ve had this angry conversation between Sonic and Knuckles. I get he’s Jeff’s friend in real life, but Jeff needs to grow a pair of brain cells and accept that he has to tell his friend he can’t be in it. Or how we’ve had that big epic fight of Super Sonic and Super Shadow suddenly shifting to Jim Carrey smacking his own butt. Or Gerald’s death scene being played for laughs. Gerald is a man who should’ve written and given more respect than this but Jeff Fowler, the supposed Shadow fanboy, couldn’t be bothered. Then again, JJ Abrams is a supposed Star Wars fan boy and he couldn’t be bothered to do a reunion between Han, Luke and Leia and bluntly told Hamill he wasn’t doing it. Tom and Maddie’s dumb scene with Tails’ gadgets take away from the film’s tone as well. Oi, filmmakers, MAKE UP YOUR MIND!

That’s not getting into the plot holes the film has already made with the continuity of the films, like how GUN had now been around the whole time despite the second film only recently establishing them in universe. Or how there’s the matter of how Shadow even recognised Commander Walters years later despite having not seen him ever since Maria died. There’s the other matter of why Maria was even allowed to stay in a secret army base. I know she’s Gerald’s granddaughter, but children are not allowed in these bases. It’s incredibly poorly thought out. If Maria had an illness and the research in Shadow was a joined work between the army and the medicinal experts then it’d have made more sense to have had her there. It’d have kept truer to Shadow’s backstory in which he was being experimented on for medicinal matters, I mean if his quill is strong enough to keep Gerald alive then that should’ve been a way to explore healing Maria. Gosh Jeff you didn’t think it through did ya?

Gerald’s character was that badly treated that we didn’t even get him or Maria together that showed us what he was like with her. We just have him trying to take her and Shadow away. If Jeff actually devoted more scenes to Shadow’s past and showed just how much he saw Gerald as a father and Gerald loved him and Maria, it could’ve made the film a big gut punch to the audiences.

He’s not the only character who got written badly, for while Knuckles was good in the second movie, they’ve now turned him into the dumb muscle that he was known for in Sonic Boom. This s annoying because they worked hard to get Knuckles away from that but then they’re like “Nope, gotta make him dumb”. It’s frustrating cos I feel it wastes Idris Elba’s skills as an actor and I know this might annoy some but it just gives me racial vibes of “Oh, the native/black themed guy is dumb”. It’s giving me that vibe which is stupid, insulting and doesn’t suit Idris Elba that well. The fourth movie oughta clear this up, cos Knuckles and Idris deserve better.

I did say that this film was too scared to stick to a mature theme and that the film should’ve taken this chance to close the last page on a book with this movie. They lost that chance to really have this film be impactful. The movie to me should’ve killed Tom or at least have him that badly injured and with Sonic having gone against GUN we should’ve seen the after effects, that and a bit of the moon is gone, there’s gonna be lots of people wanting answers and GUN will want to capture Sonic for raiding a GUN base, involved in the moon losing a bit of itself. It’s why to me the movie should’ve ended with Sonic, Tails and Knuckles leaving Earth to take the Master Emerald safe and to get Tom and Maddie out of trouble. I mean come on, think of it, Sonic, Tails and Knuckles are going to leave with the Master Emerald, they have a sad goodbye to Tom and Maddie and go. But instead we’re still on Earth and now with Amy and Metal Sonic coming into the series we’re gonna be left with characters trying to get more scenes and that means more wasted characters.

So all in all, I can say that I find Sonic the Hedgehog 3 the weakest of the movies. With a smaller cast working for its first movie, a near perfect second movie and then an overstuffed third movie, I’m gonna have to stick with the second as my favourite, at least on DVD you can skip that wedding scene. This movie has its moments of goodness but sadly it was not the epic debut of Shadow on the big screen but instead Jim Carrery being himself and an uneven tone that affected the movie. It’s why I’m more iffy on the fourth movie, especially with it involving time travel and more Sonic characters coming in, I think Jeff Fowler will go the Michael Bay route and just start having the Sonic characters as mere set pieces and focus on the humans more. I hope he doesn’t but after he let Jim Carrery run about in Sonic 3 I’ve lost a bit of faith in him.

Freddy: That’s a shame.

Teddy: But hey, I can take that crown away.

Cheers.

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