Sonic the Hedgehog has lived more cinematic lives than anyone had any reason to think he should. A reasonably popular video game character but by no means an all-timer, Sonic charmed our pants off just as the pandemic was beginning, debuting in a movie named after himself in February of 2020. Things should have been creatively spent by March of 2022, when the sequel frittered away the good will the first movie had earned, but the box office would say otherwise, prompting a Sonic the Hedgehog 3. If that decision were creatively unwarranted – though given the state of Hollywood, probably not unexpected – the real surprise might have been releasing it at the most high-profile time of the movie calendar: Boxing Day.

Sometimes when you roll the dice big, it comes up in your favour. And true enough, the third Sonic movie wins back some of what was lost in its sequel, in large part due to Jim Carrey offering the sort of go-for-broke dual role that has all the comedic pizzazz of his iconic 1990s efforts. In Sonic the Hedgehog 3, Carrey plays both the role he’s always had in this series, Doctor Ivo Robotnik a.k.a. Eggman, and the role of Eggman’s own grandfather, Gerald. Yes, you read that right. And while Carrey’s plastic face and spasmodic stylings were key to the varying levels of comedic energy present in the first two films, two Carreys are undoubtedly better than one.

At the start of this film, Sonic (voice of Ben Schwartz) is still in the general care of his two human companions, Tom (James Marsden) and Maddie (Tika Sumpter). Last film he acquired two companions of his own species, Tails (voice of Colleen O’Shaughnessy) and Knuckles (voice of Idris Elba), the latter of whom was his enemy in the previous film, a status that was unlikely to be enduring. (Technically those two are not the same species, as they are a fox and an echidna, but they’re all super-powered aliens who can travel through magical rings, so any distinctions beyond that seem rather pointless.)

Someone from Sonic’s own actual actual species – another hedgehog – is going to be the problem character to deal with this time around, in the former of Shadow the Hedgehog, who looks like Sonic but with different colouring. And far more advanced skills, as Shadow can disappear and reappear in fights, to go along with other tricks too numerous to mention. In fact, Shadow has been deemed dangerous enough to be kept in suspended animation in a secret base lo these past 50 years. And if you want any further evidence that the Sonic franchise is inexplicably gaining in cultural cachet as it goes, Shadow is voiced by Keanu Reeves.

Of course, Shadow is not long for his secret base confinement, and once he escapes, it’s only a matter of time before he crosses paths with our trio of heroes, as well as with a man who was a friend among the human community before Shadow became a security threat: Gerald Robotnik, the wildly mustachioed grandfather of Sonic’s BEF (best enemy forever) Ivo. Ivo has been in hiding since the events of the previous film, neutered into a flabby TV watcher who is still camped out in his high-tech ship and still receiving goat milk lattes from his assistant Agent Stone (Lee Majdoub), but the return of his grandfather will give him a family connection he never knew he had – as well as a path to resume his familiar plotting of mischief.

There may be no better illustration of the lunacy of which a Sonic the Hedgehog movie is capable than when the two versions of Carrey, both looking and speaking oddly but at slight variations from one another, join together to dance through a field of security lasers to the Chemical Brothers’ song “Galvanize.” Movies aimed at children should go a bit out of bounds if they want a chance to be distinctive, but many try to accomplish this through slapstick and uninspired wordplay – and that was the real failing of Sonic the Hedgehog 2. The third movie executes this agenda with panache to spare, and Carrey – whom we rarely see at all these days, and never with this sense of rejuvenation of a past version of himself – is the key. Director Jeff Fowler, in this third straight Sonic movie, is likely giving Carrey some kind of guiding hand here, but with a performer like Carrey, especially when showing flashes of his prime, the best approach is just to get out of the way and let the magic happen.

The movie would not successfully revive toward its own earlier incarnation if the other details weren’t handled equally well. While the Tails character still feels a bit superfluous, there’s a fun remainder of the rivalry between Sonic and Knuckles that energises their interactions, even if we now know Knuckles is an old softie. The script by Pat Casey, Josh Miller and John Whittington also finds slightly better use of Marsden and Sumpter as our two primary good humans, whose role in the proceedings was ill-conceived, to say the least, in the last movie. They’re still essentially superfluous as well – the more characters you add to a franchise, the more you run that risk – but a functional script can weave them in well enough, and this one does.

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is not going to win any fans purely on the basis of its overall plotting, its overall build-up toward one of those extended finales that goes on way too long and puts the fate of the entire earth in the balance. But by the third movie in any series, it should be more about the characters than what they do, and it turns out this series does have a number of characters we’ve grown to want to watch. And with another tease of future expansion as a mid-credits sequence, we can only hope that Sonic the Hedgehog 4 continues the positive gains of Sonic the Hedgehog 3.

 

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 opened yesterday in cinemas.