Wednesday, February 26, 2020

Sonic the Hedgehog - A Very Light & Quite Fun Family Friendly Movie Based on the Popular Video Game Character

After combination of busy time at work plus the desire to stay home and take rest during the weekend, I finally decided to see this new movie that just had its wide release in Indonesia yesterday. The 7.15 PM show time at the studio near our home was just nice for me as I would have ample time to reach location from my place of work. Anyway, I will go ahead with this movie now.

Brief Story Line

In the small town of Green Hill, an extraterrestrial blue hedgehog named Sonic (voiced by Ben Schwartz - Park and Recreation TV series etc) had been living on his own. However, after an incident, he found himself being chased by the government who assigned a genius/mad scientist Dr. Robotnik (Jim Carrey - Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Liar Liar etc) to find out the reason and ultimately capture him.


Sonic had no choice but to turn to the town sheriff Tom Wachowski (James Marsden - Westworld TV series, 27 Dresses etc) and later Tom's wife Maddie (Tika Sumpter - Southside with You etc) for help.

So what would happen to Sonic? Find them all in this family friendly and very light comedy adventure movie.

End of Brief Story Line

I had known about Sonic the Hedgehog for quite a long time as he was (and still) a very popular character from the video game published by Sega, even if I did not play the game quite a lot like my wife did during our childhood years. So when we found out about this movie, obviously we were interested in seeing it as we thought it would be fun. And it did not disappoint us in term of the fun part. We were quite entertained with the comedy side of this movie.

In here, the story was very light and definitely not the main focus as it emphasized more on the very talkative Sonic and his relationship with Tom Wachowski. Credit has to be given to Ben Schwartz for being able to bring to life this likable character. However, if we have to single out a performance, my wife and I really were amazed by Jim Carrey. He showed a lot of his trademarks style of slapstick humor (really reminded me of his previous classic roles) and was truly convincing as the really annoying bad guy Dr. Robotnik (the real antagonist in the video game). To be honest I had my doubts about having him as the villain, but he really gave a great performance where lots of times we laughed because of him. 

In addition to the main cast, there were few other supporting roles, with one or two that left a nice enough impression, namely Natasha Rothwell as Maddie's sister Rachel and Adam Paly as Tom's deputy Wade. These two also brought some humor to the movie. Btw, the film had a duration of less than 100 minutes including a mid end credit scene, but no post end credit scene. So it was not too long for kids to enjoy the movie.

One thing that was the obvious attraction was the CGI creation of Sonic himself. For those who did not know, the early design of Sonic was really bad and got a lot of backlash from fans of the game. But luckily they redesign him and this new version was awesome, definitely a lot better than the first. Below is a comparison of the earlier and the final design of Sonic. You would see how much difference it was, right?


So if you are looking for a nice enough and fun video game adaptation of a very popular character (and obviously if you are fans of the game), then this is a must movie to see. It is a very family friendly movie, easy enough to understand by kids and enjoyable enough for the more mature viewers. As long as you are not the kind of audience who could only like a movie with wonderful plot, then you should be fine. And from what I understand, this film is quite successful commercially and not having really bad critics rating. If it's great enough, most likely there would be a sequel as hinted from the movie itself. 

Mike's movie moments rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

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