Sonic races onto the big screen

By Caleb Spencer / Staff Writer

When I opened up my present at my eighth birthday party to find a brand-new Game Boy Advance, I was ecstatic.

I already loved playing games on my dad’s Playstation 2, but now I could take my favorite games anywhere I went. The first game I ever owned for the system was the original “Sonic the Hedgehog.” I played “Sonic” all the time, but being a child, I was awful at the game and never got past even the first world. Still, I loved that game, even if I was objectively the worst player to ever touch it at the time.

Nowadays, I see “Sonic” as a perfect example of video games in the 90s. They’re wild, full of bright colors and cartoonish enemies, and never take themselves too seriously. Once I heard they were making a live-action “Sonic” movie, that’s what I hoped they would do with whatever story they got from the original game.

For the most part, my wishes were fulfilled.

I knew I wasn’t going to be the target audience for this movie from the trailers, and I was right. First and foremost, this is a movie for children – the jokes are simple and mild-mannered, the plot is overly simple, and yes, Sonic flosses two whole times in the movie. None of this is a problem, of course, but I feel like it’s important to mention.

For what I wanted out of the movie, let’s start with the positive. I got my cartoonish enemy in Dr. Robotnik, played by Jim Carrey, who brings back his crazy acting chops from movies like “The Mask” to make the mad scientist feel fun and just how I imagined he would be. Sonic himself is a fun character to follow, as he makes clever jokes in the middle of action-packed fights, and the movie as a whole feels like stupid fun without going terribly overboard.

My real only complaint is I feel like this didn’t have to be a “Sonic” movie. There’s no solid reason it has to be Sonic saving the day, outside of making the movie easy to sell to fans of the original games.

Of course, this doesn’t take away from the movie itself, but it did make me uninterested in some parts because I didn’t care too much about characters that weren’t Sonic.

“Sonic” is a fun time for families to go and see, and I would recommend this to anyone who loved Sonic as a kid. However, if you don’t care much about the character Sonic and aren’t seeing this with family, there’s not a whole lot here to buy a ticket over.

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