Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is Shockingly Good

There's a scene in Jeff Fowler's Sonic the Hedgehog 3 where the rising sun washes over its conflicted villain, the Keanu Reeves-voiced Shadow the Hedgehog, recalling an earlier moment of Shadow sitting under the stars with his now long-dead best friend, a young girl named Maria (a mischievous Alyla Browne), whose demise has driven him to anger. It's tragic, wistful, and moving, and just typing this out makes me feel like I'm losing my mind. The video game-based live action hybrid isn't just good, it may very well be great. You could mention it in the same breath as recent animated works like Flow and The Wild Robot — fun and touching action-dramas that could become classics in time — and it wouldn't feel out of place.

There's no getting around how limp and lifeless those first two Sonic movies are — works that take for granted that featuring a familiar character is effort enough. That's all some viewers need: babies, and adults who act like them, and if that sounds bitter and condescending, it's only because I was on the receiving end of online threats and a doxing bounty for not liking the last one of these. What a relief, then, that Sonic the Hedgehog 3 not only works like a charm, but overcomes nearly every flaw of its predecessors, and often tackles them head-on.

Things kick off inside a prison facility off the coast of Japan. Its name is delightfully silly: Prison Island, overseen by a donut-munching Jorma Taccone. Shadow, a black-furred hedgehog with red streaks, has been kept in stasis for 50 years, floating in a liquid tank under armed guard, but something, or someone, has suddenly awoken him. He breaks out, kicks the asses of about 30 SWAT members (with powers that resemble teleportation) and heads for Tokyo, where he realizes how much time has passed. The rain pours down on the scowling creature, his soaking fur — a tough thing to animate — awash in the deep purples and neons of light-up billboards all around him, in a scene distinctly reminiscent of the John Wick movies. "I've been asleep for 50 years?" Reeves rasps, completing the comparison.

There isn't a beat out of place in this dramatic prologue, which is itself a whiplash-inducing notion, given the plainness and broad comedy of the previous entries. It's fitting, then, that in order to aid our transition to the threequel, the very next scene takes us back to rural Montana, where much of the series has unfolded. Here, the found family trio of Sonic (Ben Schwartz), Tails the Fox (Colleen O'Shaughnessey), and Knuckles the warrior echidna (Idris Elba) engage in sibling roughhousing (really, rough-racing) and some aw-shucks banter with their adoptive parents, the good-natured Tom and Maddie Wachowski (James Marsden and Tika Sumpter). It would perhaps be giving the filmmakers too much credit to say the dull color palette of this setting — which carries over from Sonics 1 and 2 — is owed to some genius meta-commentary, but that it's slowly replaced by more vibrancy as the film proceeds (in the characters' fur especially) is at least worth noting.

A key issue with the previous Sonic films is that Sonic himself was never really well-defined beyond quips and catchphrases, but the movie kick-starts an intriguing emotional journey when he and Tom discuss the alien planet from which he hails, and whether his long, lost adoptive mother, the wise owl Longclaw, would be proud of the blue speedster. The doe-eyed Marsden reminds him, as any good kids' movie parent should, that he's defined by his choices. As the family sits around a campfire, tech-wiz Tails roasts his marshmallow to perfection with a blowtorch, while Knuckles, the brutish lunk, burns his to a crisp — comic beats that broadly define each hero — but Sonic sulks in silence. Like the series thus far, he doesn't seem to know who he is either.

It isn't long before the furry trio is called up by the military organization G.U.N. (Guardian Units of Nations) to help track down and subdue Shadow in Japan, a battle that tests their mettle as a team, but leaves them in the dirt. What becomes immediately clear is that Shadow is quite possibly one of the coolest characters in recent children's cinema, not just because of his intense brooding — he's moody and adolescent on the surface, but reveals meaningful depth — but because he's so much goddamn fun to watch. The way he's animated and lit (sometime with flame) makes him feel like a living, breathing part of the environment, and he can also extend his abilities to objects by electrifying them, resulting in Sonic having to chase him down on a super-swift bike that Shadow Akira-slides up the side of a building. Tom Cruise, eat your heart out (though not before you admire the movie's many Mission: Impossible homages in its heist-heavy final act).

The movie's visual references to other works (like Tron: Legacy) help move it quickly along. It seldom slows down, even as it spends much of its first hour introducing and re-introducing characters ad nauseam. Jim Carrey's scheming Dr. Ivo Robotnik is back, as is his lovelorn henchman Agent Stone (Lee Majdoub), whose crush on Robotnik is played much more meaningfully than a fleeting gag. In fact, it's the center of its own subplot that ties into the movie's larger themes, which slowly come to light when Robotnik is forced to team up with Sonic & co. to find out who's been using the mad doctor's technology to free Shadow and wreak havoc on G.U.N. The real culprit turns out to be Robotnik's long lost grandfather, Gerald Robotnik, who's also played by Carrey, offering the '90s comedy mainstay the chance to let loose as his silliest, rubber-face-iest self.

Gerland, it turns out, has a history with Shadow that's slowly revealed over the course of the film, via flashbacks filled with surprising drama. The villainous hedgehog was once an experiment, and teetered on the edge of becoming a monster, but it was Maria's kindness that made him feel at home, even if temporarily. But something went wrong. Maria is dead, and Shadow blames not only G.U.N., but the world at large, yielding an uncontainable anger born from a loveless void.

Perhaps it's passé to say that "love is the answer" — then again, the Interstellar re-release did just rake in the big bucks — but it's a fitting theme for a film like this one, where the leading trio are essentially stuffed animals in motion, who sing the praises of teamwork. The notion emanates outward. Stone, though he helps Robotnik, finds himself constantly rejected — a story told through delightful use of blocking and performance — while Robotnik fills his own lifelong void by teaming up with his manipulative grandfather, for some Ocean's 12-inspired heist shenanigans.

Atop it all is the question of how Sonic fits into all this, despite the film and the series bearing his name. It's a conundrum, because he really is an awkward fit for such an otherwise sincere movie. When his teammates make jokes emanating from character traits (like Knuckles' literal-mindedness), Sonic tends to add noise with quips that re-explain the gags in question. It's not quite an intentional look at the character's tone, but even as a failure to fully integrate him into his own movie at first, it paves the path for a genuinely meaningful story.

What separates Sonic and Shadow, two aliens who made Earth their home, is that one found a new family, while the other — though he also did at first — was left only with pain. But what happens when Sonic is forced to make major decisions after being shouldered with a similar emotional burden? The last two films were mostly fluff, to the point of introducing concepts like "chaos emeralds" and Sonic's super-charged "golden god" mode without imbuing them with meaning. Sonic the Hedgehog 3, on the other hand, re-fashions the series' previous ideas, through the lens of rigorous emotional dilemmas — even Shadow's powers seem connected to his rage — super-charging all the action in the process, while still making enough room for some goofy antics.

Few recent studio films occupying this children’s video game niche have been led by this much heart and pathos. It's hard not to be swept up in the emotions of Sonic the Hedgehog 3, and ever harder not to give yourself over to its thrilling childlike glee.

Sonic the Hedgehog hits theaters on December 20.