For one thing the franchise no longer seems as afraid to
commit to the brand as it was in the prior film, the majority of the focus is
on the Sonic characters and the film originals (I.e., The Humans) receive
far less screentime than they did in the prior instalment. To be fair this is an
issue that has played the Sonic franchise across all media, they never
seem to catch on that-excluding Robotnik-no one cares about human characters in
Sonic, that’s not what they want to see, they want to see cartoon
animals with superpowers go on adventures and fight each other, which this film
certainly delivers on. Infamously the original film had an awful character
design for a “realistic Sonic” and only after fan backlash did they commit to a
more faithful design, but it was clear it was too late to change the rest of
the film to fit a more cartoonish tone. This time round we mainly follow Sonic
(Ben Shwartz) and Tails (Colleen O'Shaughnessey) go on a globe trotting
adventure against Knuckles (Idris Elba) and a redesigned and more faithful Dr
Robotnik (Jim Carrey), with the humans intentionally being sent off on vacation
to be absent for most of the picture.
So with this lesson seemingly being learnt, why on Earth did
the creators decide to commit most of the 3rd act to following exclusively
the human characters? Had they really not learnt their lesson? No one cares
about whatshernames wedding or the whatchamacallit cop, they are not
interesting characters, and they certainly don’t offer anything in terms of
legitimate comedy, when all they do is pull silly faces and make pop-culture
references. An extended sequence of Rachel (Natasha Rothwell) who if you need
to be reminded is the protagonists parental figure’s sister…so as deep into
tertiary characters as you can get, has a dedicated 10 minutes of the film exclusively
following her, her wedding and her relationship, when none of the actual main
characters are present, and this has nothing to do with the main plot, was
there no one in the room to point out in this 2 hour movie that literally not a
single audience member gives a damn about this character or their relationships?
Of course this is not the only unfunny sequence of the film,
because the entirety of the film lacks any sense of comedic talent being present
in the writing process, where nearly every single joke consists of solely
pop-culture references. Not making any witty observations or pastiches, but
just acknowledging when something is like Batman, or Ghostbusters,
or name-dropping Oprah or Dwayne Johnson because people recognise these things
and that is the entirety of the joke. The blame here is entirely on the writers
because much of this cast have done good comedy work before, and the problems
with the script don’t stop there.
Yet again the writers feel the need to baby their audience
by spelling out every lesson, arc or change in case the 3-year-old on their
iPad was confused on what was happening. Early in the film Sonic’s arc is
established of trying to become a hero, but to do so he will have to make a
truly selfless action, which they refer to as “his moment” and several times in
the film when any progress in his arc is made, he points it out by verbalising “This
is my moment”. Seriously, show even the slightest bit of respect for your audience,
they will understand what a character arc is, it’s a plot for a Sonic the
Hedgehog movie, it is very basic and easy to understand and predict, they
did not need it spelling out for them.
To keep it blunt, as it’s what this film would prefer, Sonic
The Hedgehog 2 is…better than the original. The focus is mainly on the
right characters, the tone and story are better suited for it, but better does
not translate to good, and unless they actually get some competent writers
behind these films I don’t think they ever will be, because they seem contempt
with offering some of the laziest, pandering and unfunny scripts possible for
these films.
-Danny
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