Crank that hog
There is something indescribably soothing about the existence of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 in its current form. And that starts right with the fact that it's been titled Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and not, like, Sonic the Hedgehog: Knuckle Down or Sonic the Hedgehog: Tails I Win, or Sonic the Hedgehog: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, or whatever. There's something calmingly artless about good ol' Arabic numeral like that. It lets us know in advance that the filmmakers weren't at all worried about being clever; they just knew there was a market to be fed, and that market hungrily ate up Sonic the Hedgehog back in the winter of 2020 (it was, in fact, the last film to have a mostly normal commercial release in North American prior to the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2). And now there's more of it for that market - there's two of it, no less.
One could, in fact, argue that there is three of it. Back in 2020, just about the only part of the first Sonic the Hedgehog that mostly worked was Sonic the Hedgehog himself, a CGI cartoon character voiced by Ben Schwartz and given just exactly the amount of photorealistic surfacing and carefully-managed lighting effects to fit into the live-action footage of humans that dominated the film (you can add a second thing that worked if your tolerance for Jim Carrey in full "rubber-faced maniac" mode is higher than mine - much higher). Sonic the Hedgehog 2 triples the number of CGI cartoon animals, exactly as was promised in the post-credits scene of the last film: Sonic is back, of course, and there's also a yellow fox with two tails that allow him to fly like a helicopter, named Tails (Colleen O'Shaughnessey), as well as a red echidna with giant spiked boxing gloves and a very slow wit, named Knuckles (Idris Elba).
That's already more than enough to tell us the first piece of good news: Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is much, much closer to the games than the first movie was. That's also the last piece of good news, honestly speaking. The new film might very well triple the number of uncanny CGI creatures with huge eyes and spindly little rubber hose limbs, but it has not, sadly, tripled the rendering budget, and none of the three characters look nearly as good as Sonic did in his solo trip to cinemas. Which is quite a surprise when you recollect how that Sonic was the result of a deliriously rushed makeover after the inexplicably hideous first design of the character was met with open horror after the trailer premiered. And perhaps I am simply misremembering the effects in the 2020 film as being better than they were, tempering my memories with nostalgia for the Before Times. At any rate, the effects here in 2022 are kind of shabby, albeit inconsistently. The eyes aren't right, mostly.
At any rate, good effects or not, the film refocuses its attention on these three characters, and that's unambiguously a good thing: the bizarre insistance on orienting an entire plotline around flesh-and-blood human beings in the first movie was easily its most tiresome trait, particularly since the humans in question were such bland stiffs. They're still here - the Wachowskis, Tom (James Marsden) and Maddie (Tika Sumpter) are heading to Hawai'i for her sister's wedding, and that leaves Sonic alone for the weekened, which is when all of the remarkable and terrible things happen; the film cuts back to the wedding just enough for it to be an unendurable drag, but it's ultimately not more than several minutes out of the whole movie, and even when Tom and Maddie get pulled back into the main trunk of the plot, they're never really the focus.
The only human we really need to bother with this time is Dr. Robotnik (Carrey), left bald and with a massive bushy mustache as a result of the events of the first movie (he does not, as yet, have an egg-shaped torso; must leave something for Sonic the Hedgehog 3), whose science is even madder than it was before, now that he's had long months exiled on an alien planet to plot his revenge against Sonic. That revenge involves a whole lot of mythology that is, as far as I can recall, true to the games in the middle and latter part of the '90s; it involves magic power sources called Chaos Emeralds and using Knuckles, last of the echidnas, as his catspaw. It's a bit sprawling and boring, mostly, and it leads to the absolutely no-two-ways-about-it worst part of Sonic the Hedgehog 2: it somehow has attained a running time of 122 minutes, which is just a goddamn immoral running time for a children's sci-fi adventure-comedy about three talking animals smashing into each other at high speeds and Jim Carrey pulling faces (Sonic the Hedgehog, for the record, came it at a vastly more defensible 99 minutes). It's absolutely suffocating.
The flipside is that the newfound emphasis on lore has had the gratifying side-effect of using up quite a bit of the space in the screenplay that was, last time, taken up by somberly miserable jokes: both Schwartz and Carrey have been given fairly substantial quantities of dense sci-fi gobbeldygook, and this means they get less time for gags. For Schwartz, this means less staccato quipping, the off-putting compulsive need to fill every dialogue free patch of the soundtrack with some kind of zinger that comes from nowhere and has no other punchline than the sheer fact of his fast line deliveries and the way that sometimes the zingers are pop culture references. There are, to be clear, still lots of examples of this kind of robotic, rat-a-tat one-liner delivery, and its at its worst in the early going; the first setpiece, which finds Sonic destroying a block of downtown Seattle in an attempt to prove that he's a superhero, is particularly galling in the wall of brittle, snappy banter that fills it (though, happily, Sonic is never chagrined by this opening screw-up, or even seems to be aware that his actions have inconvenienced others; and I think we're at a point where kids' movie heroes who are blithe, arrogant assholes feels like a wonderful breath of fresh air). But there is less of it, and since the name of the game here is finding the thin gradations of quality by which Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is ever so slightly better or worse than Sonic the Hedgehog, this is the kind of calculation we must do.
Carrey, meanwhile, is just plain better than he was before, now that he's forced to execute a character arc (though one that evaporates in the final act; the film doesn't so much cast out sequel hooks as it leaves plot threads tangling). I think there might also be something about the way that his make-up no has him looking much goofier and garish, a decent practical analogue for the CGI animals, that softens the noisiness of his toneless comic bellowing; he's more like an actual living cartoon in his physical appearance, not just his tiresome behavior.
In a sense, then, this is the very best kind of sequel: more of exactly the same thing, but all slightly bigger and slightly better. That being said, the first movie left enough space for a better movie to still be bad, and that's exactly the needle that Sonic the Hedgehog 2 threads; though to be honest, I wonder if just having a shorter running time, and with it a narrative compression that would speed this up and leave it less of a boring slog, would be all it would take to shove this up to "actually watchable".
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
One could, in fact, argue that there is three of it. Back in 2020, just about the only part of the first Sonic the Hedgehog that mostly worked was Sonic the Hedgehog himself, a CGI cartoon character voiced by Ben Schwartz and given just exactly the amount of photorealistic surfacing and carefully-managed lighting effects to fit into the live-action footage of humans that dominated the film (you can add a second thing that worked if your tolerance for Jim Carrey in full "rubber-faced maniac" mode is higher than mine - much higher). Sonic the Hedgehog 2 triples the number of CGI cartoon animals, exactly as was promised in the post-credits scene of the last film: Sonic is back, of course, and there's also a yellow fox with two tails that allow him to fly like a helicopter, named Tails (Colleen O'Shaughnessey), as well as a red echidna with giant spiked boxing gloves and a very slow wit, named Knuckles (Idris Elba).
That's already more than enough to tell us the first piece of good news: Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is much, much closer to the games than the first movie was. That's also the last piece of good news, honestly speaking. The new film might very well triple the number of uncanny CGI creatures with huge eyes and spindly little rubber hose limbs, but it has not, sadly, tripled the rendering budget, and none of the three characters look nearly as good as Sonic did in his solo trip to cinemas. Which is quite a surprise when you recollect how that Sonic was the result of a deliriously rushed makeover after the inexplicably hideous first design of the character was met with open horror after the trailer premiered. And perhaps I am simply misremembering the effects in the 2020 film as being better than they were, tempering my memories with nostalgia for the Before Times. At any rate, the effects here in 2022 are kind of shabby, albeit inconsistently. The eyes aren't right, mostly.
At any rate, good effects or not, the film refocuses its attention on these three characters, and that's unambiguously a good thing: the bizarre insistance on orienting an entire plotline around flesh-and-blood human beings in the first movie was easily its most tiresome trait, particularly since the humans in question were such bland stiffs. They're still here - the Wachowskis, Tom (James Marsden) and Maddie (Tika Sumpter) are heading to Hawai'i for her sister's wedding, and that leaves Sonic alone for the weekened, which is when all of the remarkable and terrible things happen; the film cuts back to the wedding just enough for it to be an unendurable drag, but it's ultimately not more than several minutes out of the whole movie, and even when Tom and Maddie get pulled back into the main trunk of the plot, they're never really the focus.
The only human we really need to bother with this time is Dr. Robotnik (Carrey), left bald and with a massive bushy mustache as a result of the events of the first movie (he does not, as yet, have an egg-shaped torso; must leave something for Sonic the Hedgehog 3), whose science is even madder than it was before, now that he's had long months exiled on an alien planet to plot his revenge against Sonic. That revenge involves a whole lot of mythology that is, as far as I can recall, true to the games in the middle and latter part of the '90s; it involves magic power sources called Chaos Emeralds and using Knuckles, last of the echidnas, as his catspaw. It's a bit sprawling and boring, mostly, and it leads to the absolutely no-two-ways-about-it worst part of Sonic the Hedgehog 2: it somehow has attained a running time of 122 minutes, which is just a goddamn immoral running time for a children's sci-fi adventure-comedy about three talking animals smashing into each other at high speeds and Jim Carrey pulling faces (Sonic the Hedgehog, for the record, came it at a vastly more defensible 99 minutes). It's absolutely suffocating.
The flipside is that the newfound emphasis on lore has had the gratifying side-effect of using up quite a bit of the space in the screenplay that was, last time, taken up by somberly miserable jokes: both Schwartz and Carrey have been given fairly substantial quantities of dense sci-fi gobbeldygook, and this means they get less time for gags. For Schwartz, this means less staccato quipping, the off-putting compulsive need to fill every dialogue free patch of the soundtrack with some kind of zinger that comes from nowhere and has no other punchline than the sheer fact of his fast line deliveries and the way that sometimes the zingers are pop culture references. There are, to be clear, still lots of examples of this kind of robotic, rat-a-tat one-liner delivery, and its at its worst in the early going; the first setpiece, which finds Sonic destroying a block of downtown Seattle in an attempt to prove that he's a superhero, is particularly galling in the wall of brittle, snappy banter that fills it (though, happily, Sonic is never chagrined by this opening screw-up, or even seems to be aware that his actions have inconvenienced others; and I think we're at a point where kids' movie heroes who are blithe, arrogant assholes feels like a wonderful breath of fresh air). But there is less of it, and since the name of the game here is finding the thin gradations of quality by which Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is ever so slightly better or worse than Sonic the Hedgehog, this is the kind of calculation we must do.
Carrey, meanwhile, is just plain better than he was before, now that he's forced to execute a character arc (though one that evaporates in the final act; the film doesn't so much cast out sequel hooks as it leaves plot threads tangling). I think there might also be something about the way that his make-up no has him looking much goofier and garish, a decent practical analogue for the CGI animals, that softens the noisiness of his toneless comic bellowing; he's more like an actual living cartoon in his physical appearance, not just his tiresome behavior.
In a sense, then, this is the very best kind of sequel: more of exactly the same thing, but all slightly bigger and slightly better. That being said, the first movie left enough space for a better movie to still be bad, and that's exactly the needle that Sonic the Hedgehog 2 threads; though to be honest, I wonder if just having a shorter running time, and with it a narrative compression that would speed this up and leave it less of a boring slog, would be all it would take to shove this up to "actually watchable".
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
