Review: 'Sonic The Hedgehog 3' Delivers Funny Family-Friendly ...

Santa comes early for Sony’s Sonic the Hedgehog 3 to the tune of $60-65 million at the domestic box office, off positive reviews and what’s likely to be enthusiastic endorsement from kids and parents for this funny family-friendly escapism.

Idris Elba, Ben Schwartz and Colleen O'Shaughnessey star in "Sonic the Hedgehog 3."

With an 85% critical reception at Rotten Tomatoes, we’ll have to wait to see how popular Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is with audiences when Cinemascore comes in Friday.

But buzz is through the roof, and at the advance screening I attended the collection of reviewers, bloggers, and folks who brought plenty of kids were all laughing, applauding, and came running back into the theater when they heard post-credit scenes (yes, there are two of them, so stay through the entire credits — judging from the reaction of the young fans in the audience, it was well worth it).

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is tracking toward $55-60 million, but I anticipate an overperformance. I’m being conservative right now and putting it at roughly 10% ahead of estimates, but once we get into Christmas and the international markets join in, I expect Sonic 3 to blow the doors of the holiday box office.

Which is great news for Sony, after last weekend’s face-plant by Kraven the Hunter, so bad that even before it bowed at the box office Sony already knew the numbers were going to be so bad they’d decided to shelve their entire Spider-Man Universe spinoff plans and focus on Spidey’s own movies. So while the SSU might some day come back to life (and there are a few good ways it could), Sony is in need of some higher-tier franchise to take the place of what they’d hoped would be a consistent $800 million to $1 billion tentpole.

So Sonic races to the rescue at just the right time — as the SSU franchises saw declining returns, Sonic the Hedgehog movies have seen increases in box office and ancillary revenue streams on home entertainment and elsewhere. So high is the interest and awareness around this movie, I went into a press screening wondering if it would live up to the hype and convince me it’s a contender for the seasonal crown.

Well, color me convinced. I think Sonic the Hedgehog 3 could win the Christmas box office holiday, topping even Disney’s Mufasa: The Lion King and Moana 2 in final box office totals. Mufasa opens this weekend worldwide and could hit $200 million. But domestically, Sonic came in fast on Mufasa’s heels and looks to win the race stateside.

Moana 2, meanwhile, is still riding its record-setting wave toward $900 million or more, but has slowed enough I’m not positive it will top $1 billion. And once the Sony video game star debuts overseas, I suspect we’ll see Sonic the Hedgehog 3 lap the competition and make a run at the $1 billion range.

Why? Because I believe younger children will prefer Sonic the Hedgehog 3, and that it will get more repeat business because of its shorter runtime (which also makes it easier for parents to sit through it again — as does Jim Carrey’s performance, which I’ll get to shortly).

There is much to like about Sonic the Hedgehog 3, even though it’s admittedly a video game IP adapted into essentially a 109 minute ad for toys and games, in the form of a by-the-numbers story reduced to simple moving parts so that even small children can understand and have fun watching it. The trick is, they aren’t pretending to be anything else, there’s room for that kind of storytelling and entertainment — and always has been in cinema, don’t let any historical revisionists tell you otherwise — and Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is good at being what it is, and not doing damage or just taking up noisy space it doesn’t deserve at multiplexes.

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is mostly briskly paced, except for 15 minutes transitioning from Act II to Act III when it slows and gets a bit bogged down. Those bits are full of fan service, though, in the form of lots of game references and powers, as well as a bit much of the “grounded and gritty” tone to appease older fans who need broken concrete and fist-fight resolutions, not to mention some big VFX sequences and a reveal that plays out like a Marvel villain’s final act evil plot revelation.

In short, it’s 15 minutes that felt less like the rest of the movie to me, and more like padding and appeasement of certain fanbase demographics. Trim that down to five minutes and the film becomes a nice 90 minutes that would’ve felt exactly right for what it was and what it delivered.

What it delivered is, admittedly, not made for someone like me. I’m not a Sonic the Hedgehog game player, and in fact I’m not a big gamer in any sense (the only video game I’ve played any notable length of time in the 21st Century is Madden football). And I don’t have children, nor do I usually watch or enjoy much of the “family” entertainment specifically geared toward all-ages audiences full of kids. So again, not made for someone like me.

But I can watch and appreciate a film on its own merits and in its own domain, and I can especially appreciate those things when I’m surrounded by an audience of fans and kids relishing in the delight of seeing these characters on the big screen.

Sonic the Hedgehog is simple, straightforward, and with no deeper theme than “friends are good, you should really have friends, and teams are better than one person bossing everybody else around.” The CGI isn’t hyper-real and doesn’t present any particular “wow” moments worth mentioning, and the stakes are never really clear until frankly the third act (but it gets points for a solid third-act reveal and some breezy but well laid and played character turns that are frankly better than some I’ve seen in various other more “serious” action/fantasy/sci-fi movies the past many years).

It’s also mostly devoid of any real consequences, as these characters apparently can fall from miles in the air and survive, get knocked through walls, and do those things in return to other characters without lingering damage as well. It’s only in the final confrontation that things “get real” and threats escalate, but it’s so fast and so generalized that it didn’t have time to really set in.

And that’s by design, of course, because Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is after all a kids’ movie and so you can introduce such stakes for the entire audience but also need to undercut the existential crisis and horror a child might feel at the notion “oh yes the whole world and everybody you love would blow up, the whole planet would be gone.” I get it, and the film is fun enough and handles this stuff well enough that the complaints about it don’t really matter or hinder my ability to watch and enjoy the film for what it is.

It also means I didn’t think about the film’s plot or meaning after I walked out of the theater, of course. Sonic the Hedgehog 3 will not, therefore, be inspiring op-eds and essays deconstructing its meaning or emotional weight. But it’s fun, it’s silly, it’s visually different enough and interesting enough to look good on a big screen, and most important of all it has Jim Carrey providing not one but two performances inspired enough and funny enough to make it worth watching the whole movie even if the rest had been outright bad and offensive (which it’s not, it’s just inconsequential and largely meaningless if you don’t know or care about the video games).

Carrey is the life of the party here, and it’s when he shows up that everything gets better — and the kids really start laughing and getting into it, because as much as they loved and cheered the various game characters and apparent Easter egg tasks and visuals from the game itself, the most engaged they seemed in the movie itself and the story was every time Carrey was on screen. The laughs were louder, smiles bigger — and the silences longer, because when Carrey is on screen in both roles (I won’t spoil plot points, but you need to know he’s multiple characters because more of him is what makes this movie work) doing something or having a family moment, the audience was engaged and even the children cared to whatever extent you can about such characters in such situations.

The highlight of Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is a hilarious little dance routine that lets Carrey be Carrey in all the best ways, and he delights by seeming to be having as much fun doing it as we’re having watching it. It lets us escape entirely for 109 minutes, and laugh the whole time. And that’s definitely an early Christmas present.