Remember James Marsden’s character Fred O’Hare in the 2011 HOP? Well he has since retired from being the Easter Bunny, moved to Montana, changed his name to Thomas Wachowski, and has become a small-town police officer in the movie Sonic.
Sonic takes the audience ten years in the past to watch the origin story of how he ended up on Earth and flashes back to the present with him doing what Sonic does best: running.
A few minutes in, we meet Thomas and his wife Maddie, and it is found that Thomas is planning on moving on from his small-town life and going to work at a police station in Los Angeles. The movie jumps back and forth between the lives of Thomas and Sonic until Sonic creates a power outage across the northwestern part of America. Unsure of what to do, the U.S government brings in Dr. Robotnik to try and solve the mystery of the shortage. Desperate to find somewhere safe to leave Earth from, Sonic rushes to Thomas’s garage where Thomas proceeds to shoot him with a tranquillizer dart. And this is the starting point of a cross country trip from Montana to California.
The movie was surprisingly very well put together. The characters were clearly specially picked, and the revision of the Sonic animation made all the difference. The humorous bits are well timed and never overused. I was expecting a cheesy, poorly written, rushed movie that wouldn’t even keep the attention of my six-year-old sister, but I was wrong.
Walking out, I was reminded why Paramount is such a creditable movie production company. All the pieces that make Sonic iconic such as the rings, the shoes, the blue streaks, even rolling up into a ball, was all done seamlessly. Nothing felt rushed, but it didn’t drag either.
Sonic talked constantly and sometimes aimlessly, but it never became annoying or lacking of purpose. Unlike Marsden’s role in HOP, his character is developed and instead of uprooting his life for a career without any economic stability, Thomas Wachowski is dealing with the internal struggle of leaving everything behind to follow his dreams, or staying with the people that he has grown up with.
With such an iconic characters as Sonic the Hedgehog, a lot of pressure was placed on Jeff Fowler who is the director. This is his first big screen film, but he has been nominated for a short film that he wrote and directed.
Fowler has proved that his movie has what it takes to come out during a time of cinema that revolves around deeper meanings, abstract concepts, and getting down to the nitty-gritty.
Overall, Sonic is a kid’s movie that has the capability of keeping older audiences entertained without needing to add inappropriate humor or references that only adults would understand. What was expected to be a waste of an hour and forty minutes turned into an appreciation of an iconic video game character. I give Sonic the Hedgehog a five out of five stars.