99 min | PG | February 14, 2020 | Paramount Pictures
The fastest creature in the universe hides in small-town Montana, alone, until a power surge brings the government down on his head. A local sheriff and a hyperactive blue alien hit the road one step ahead of a roboticist with a god complex. It runs fast and arrives nowhere.
Sonic is the fastest creature in the universe and the loneliest. He hides on Earth in a small Montana town, watching the locals he can never meet, running laps around a baseball diamond by himself. When his powers trigger a continent-wide blackout, the government sends a roboticist to hunt him down. Jeff Fowler’s film dresses a standard buddy road trip in blue fur and rings. Underneath the chase plot, it works as a story about a kid with a gift that isolates him and a deputy who needs a reason to leave town.
Ben Schwartz voices Sonic as a hyperactive motormouth who never stops narrating his own loneliness. The performance leans on rapid-fire pop-culture chatter, and it wears thin between the action beats. James Marsden plays Tom Wachowski, the Green Hills sheriff, as a straight man with enough warmth to anchor the cartoon energy beside him. Tika Sumpter gives Maddie Wachowski more conviction than the underwritten role asks for. Jim Carrey plays Dr. Robotnik as a preening narcissist who treats his drone army as an extension of his ego, and his rubber-faced physical comedy is the only element that fully commits to the film’s chaos.
Fowler directs from a script by Pat Casey and Josh Miller that hits every road-movie checkpoint on schedule. The action set pieces use a time-freeze device borrowed from other superhero films, slowing the world to a crawl while Sonic rearranges it. The visual effects on the redesigned character integrate cleanly into live-action plates, with believable fur and weight in the contact shadows. The original score and the licensed needle drops both push hard toward generic uplift. The production design splits between the muted realism of small-town Montana and the sterile chrome of Robotnik’s mobile lab.
The film coasts on Carrey’s manic invention and Schwartz’s energy without building anything around them. The emotional core, a runaway looking for a family, gets stated rather than earned. Robotnik exits the human world before the script does anything interesting with him. Sonic the Hedgehog moves fast and lands soft. It is a competent piece of brand maintenance that mistakes velocity for momentum.