Sonic the Hedgehog 2 Review
I’m a bit late but I was finally able to check out Sonic the Hedgehog 2. A sequel to 2020’s Sonic the Hedgehog. I wasn’t all that excited for this movie, but the buzz for the movie was very positive so it did raise my curiosity for this movie, and just a couple days ago I was able to check it out. How is it? Is it better than the original movie? Let’s get started!
The Good:
What I appreciated most about this movie are both of our antagonists are very fun and very well written. And both of them were the best characters of the movie for me. As Dr. Robotnik has the great Jim Carrey and he’s just as fun, loud, and crazy as you would expect him to be. He makes a lot of very solid jokes that make me laugh. I'm a big fan of Jim Carry’s shtick and I think it works here. And with this movie he is full Dr. Robotnik from the beginning to the end, and it’s very fun. But the big stand out for me was Knuckles voiced by Idris Elba, and he was a fun character with a great sense of humor. He has a characterization that is very similar to Drax, the way he delivers humor and his sense of humor is very dry. And I thought both of them really elevated the movie for me.
Also I appreciated the character of Sonic a little bit more in this movie. In the original movie I found him to be a bit too annoying, I didn’t find him funny and he was very unlikable at points in time. With this movie, they give him more of an arc he does grow and change through-out the movie. And therefore I think the usage of him was handled much better. He was more likable and charming this time around, and I think the arc really did change my feelings on him as a character.
And another thing here is they change one of the big mistakes of the original film. The original film was a road trip movie with Sonic and James Marsden going from Montana to San Francisco, and driving across several states and in not the most exciting looking states. So they had a character that has super speed and had him stuck in a car. Here it’s a globe trotting adventure movie with Sonic doing his thing, and getting involved in some big action scenes. So it feels a bit more like the Sonic the Hedgehog video games.
Finally, there is a lot of very cool action in this movie. It’s bigger than the previous movie and it’s fun to see Sonic and Knuckles fighting it out on an avalanche or in ancient ruins. And in the finale of the movie you get a lot of big special with what happens, but don’t want to say too much because that’ll be spoilers. But it is handled very well in my opinion.
The Bad:
And the big thing here is I didn’t like the human story line at all. I don’t think it worked and it was easily the weakest aspect of the movie for me. They introduced this whole batch of characters in the original movie, but the main story of this movie doesn’t really involve the human characters whatsoever. So they had to come up with their own sub plot in the movie. And the humor was very cringy and there is this sequence in this movie that lasts about 5 minutes involving the sister that really didn’t work, and was very poorly executed. So I wish they found a better way to incorporate the human characters into the movie.
Also, the movie is over 2 hours long, it’s 2 hours and 2 minutes long (with the credits) and I don’t know if the movie needed to be that long. It felt like they could have trimmed it by 5-10 minutes. Remove that annoying sequence I was talking about, or shorten it. And just trimming 5-10 minutes from the movie makes the movie as a whole move a little bit faster.
Finally, pretty much all of the human characters besides Jim Carrery, James Marsden, and Tika Sumpter were very clingy and annoying. Like they have Robotnik’s side kick return for this movie, he’s really just there because he has to be there. They could have cut him from the movie and it wouldn’t have changed. And I really didn’t like their humor at all, it was very cringy and my least favorite humor of the entire movie.
Final Thoughts: Honestly, my expectations were raised by the amount of good buzz this movie was getting. And honestly, I know these movies have been very well received and widely regarded as some of the best video game movies out there. But as for me, I’ve had enough fun with both of them. But neither one of them just blew me away, and both of them are a bit underwhelming. So I think I would edge this movie out above the first one but it’s still not a great movie. Jim Carrey and Idris Elba are the two best things about this movie.
The Score: 8.0/10 (B-)
Comments