Rating: PG | Runtime: 110 minutes
Release Date: December 20th, 2024 (USA)
Studio: Paramount Pictures
Director(s): Jeff Fowler
Writer(s): Pat Casey & Josh Miller and John Whittington / Pat Casey & Josh Miller (story)

The light shines, even though the star is gone.

It was bound to get too full. You can’t keep adding characters without removing others and expect the finished result to feel as cohesive and solid as before. This is especially true when your plot hinges upon one of those new characters so much that he becomes the most interesting piece of the puzzle. That’s the trouble screenwriters Pat Casey, Josh Miller, and John Whittington put director Jeff Fowler into with Sonic the Hedgehog 3, though. The only way to fully utilize Shadow (Keanu Reeves) is by devoting everything to his quest. As a result, Sonic (Ben Schwartz) becomes secondary. But that can’t happen in his film. So, the filmmakers must twist the narrative to re-center Sonic within Shadow’s story. It was destined to fail.

That said, I do like how Fowler and company shoehorned in the main peripheral humans. Tom (James Marsden) and Maddie (Tika Sumpter) become motivation and inspiration—sage advice from the fringes that propel Team Sonic (rounded out by Colleen O’Shaughnessey’s Tails and Idris Elba’s Knuckles) forward. Rachel (Natasha Rothwell) and Randall (Shemar Moore) become a brief but very entertaining punch line within that usage, and we can more or less forget them all until necessary. Even Stone (Lee Majdoub) is handled well in a similar role to Ivo Robotnik (Jim Carrey)—except that his help is rebuked rather than embraced to position hero and villain’s evolutionary trajectories as mirrors to each other despite achieving the same endgame.

Sadly, the same cannot be said about G.U.N. and Robotnik’s doppelganger. While both are given expanded roles to prop up Shadow’s inclusion, they cannot overcome the fact they are filler. Director Rockwell (Krysten Ritter) is rendered so inert that I can only assume she was brought in because Tom Butler couldn’t handle the physical responsibilities of a gravity battle (his Commander Walters gets two scenes, one sitting down and one standing still). While she’s a pawn to logistics used as furniture, however, Gerald Robotnik (played by Carrey in older make-up) is a pawn the filmmakers seem to believe is crucial to whole. It’s a mistake. One that turns Ivo into Stone for tired jokes and extended comedic nonsense. They use Gerald’s superficiality to distract us from Shadow’s one-dimensionality. His presence holds Shadow back.

It’s too bad because the character is a great next step for Sonic. Here’s a space hedgehog who is ostensibly what an emerald-wielding yellow Sonic would become if all that power was augmented by tragedy rather than love. Shadow had everything ripped away. His life is one of subtraction and thus vengeance becomes his sole motivation—like Knuckles in the second film, but from an emotional place instead of a pragmatic sense of duty. I really enjoyed how the film drives that parallel home by pushing Sonic to his own brink of darkness for the climactic battle. How will projecting the circumstances that made Shadow who he is today onto Sonic affect the latter’s judgment? Will he rally the troops and lean on Tails and Knuckles to keep balance or will he lose himself to rage?

If only that lesson wasn’t stalled from coming out until the third act, I could see why so many people have been calling this installment the best of the franchise. By waiting so long without any reason beyond a desire to stuff in an unnecessary key chase (considering Sonic has zero use for the key and should simply be worried about stopping Robotnik, not beating him to it), the whole feels hollow. Sure, it’s a fun journey and Carrey earns laughs even when his foolishness trumps his effectiveness, but it really seems like the filmmakers had a solid forty minutes of content and decided to fill the rest of the runtime with fluff when a more in-depth character study of Shadow would have proven much better. It’s too many spinning plates with no way to prevent the inevitable crash.

Because we end up exactly where we started. Robotnik is presumed dead. Shadow is out of everyone’s consciousness. Sonic and family are happily enjoying life. Yes, the Blue Devil has learned love is more powerful than hate … again, but that compass has been reinforced rather than moved. Knuckles conversely discovers a bit of humility, so I guess that’s something. Enough to justify a whole movie? No. Maybe if Shadow comes back you could chalk this excursion up to being an expository prologue for his introduction, but even that’s weak considering how little we know about him beyond the origin of this specific anger. That the film must also retrofit details (G.U.N. is how old? Walters did know about Shadow’s existence? Aliens no longer need disguises?) for that to be possible makes it worse. And if Shadow doesn’t come back? Well, then it’s all been a waste of time.

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Sonic (Ben Schwartz), Knuckles (Idris Elba) and Tails (Colleen O’Shaughnessey) in SONIC THE HEDGEHOG 3 from Paramount Pictures and Sega of America, Inc.