SONIC THE HEDGEHOG 2
Cert
PG ★★★ In cinemas now
The box office returns were a surprise and so was the film. The first Sonic The Hedgehog movie wasn’t just the highest-grossing movie based on a video game but it wasn’t utterly terrible. Even more shockingly, the inevitable sequel isn’t too painful either.
Wisely, it pushes all the same buttons in roughly the same order.
Once again, this is a broad family comedy with Sega’s Sonic The Hedgehog (very much like Aardman’s Shaun The Sheep) as a well-meaning but manically hyperactive tot learning lessons about responsibility and empathy.
We begin with Sonic’s rubber-faced nemesis Dr Robotnik (an entertaining Jim Carrey) rescued from his exile on the Mushroom Planet by an alarmingly muscular, red space hedgehog called Knuckles (Idris
Elba) who hates Sonic because of a tribal rivalry on their home planet.
Knuckles forms a prickly alliance with Robotnik as they track Sonic to the
suburban house he shares with his adoptive human parents (James Marsden and Tika Sumpter).
A third new animated character, a cute flying fox called Tails (Colleen O’Shaughnessey), arrives on Earth to help Sonic (and Paramount Picture’s merchandising department) with an array of marketable gadgets.
As the film turns into an Indiana Jones-style treasure hunt for an all-powerful Lord Of The Rings-style trinket, Carrey shouts: ”I don’t want to die like this – it’s so derivative!” The most ambitious element of Sonic 2 may be its running time (how many kids can sit still for two hours?) but witty lines and zippy action scenes keep the blue blur on track for
Sonic 3.