Being born in the early 1980’s, video games were as important a piece of my childhood as anything that my parents taught me. And only a handful of games truly took up the majority of my time before the release of the PlayStation changed the gaming world forever. One of those games was obviously ‘Super Mario Bros’, like every other child of the 80’s, but the second most played game in my life still has to be ‘Sonic the Hedgehog 2’.
I played ‘Sonic 2’ on my Genesis every time I got home from school and ‘Sonic 2’ on the Game Gear every time we went on any trip. Bottom line, ‘Sonic 2’ was the game that I played for years! So, I had some pretty high hopes going into this sequel to the decent ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ movie from 2020, but pretty tempered expectations. Luckily, this sequel truly ended up being the movie that my 7 year old self would have loved!
For me, the big reason this movie works so much better than the original boils down to the addition of classic Sonic characters into the mix and finally getting to see Sonic I all his glory. Real Sonic fans will know what I’m referring to when they watch this movie. The audience I saw this movie with broke into uproarious applause at multiple points in this films slightly overlong running time.
The story here is a pretty straight forward one about a bad guy trying to acquire a mighty stone in order to become all powerful and a hero trying to stop him. Still, despite how played out this narrative is, it feels fun when you are experiencing it with such a delightful cast of characters. The heart of those new characters most certainly has to be Tails (Colleen O’Shaughnessey), but there is no way to underscore how awesome the inclusion of Idris Elba as Knuckles really is. Some of his humor in the final scenes of this film will remind Marvel fans of the hilarious deadpan of Drax in the ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ movies.
Speaking of hilarious, I recently heard that this might be Jim Carey’s last film. I hope this is not the case. Yet, while this is certainly nowhere near his best role, it’s a fitting role to go out on because he truly gets to go full Jim Carrey the whole time.
So, outside of a silly detour into a wedding, this film was enjoyable from beginning to end. It’s a little long, but doesn’t feel like it sags for long. This is mostly just a really good time at the movies with some characters that have long deserved their moment to shine on the big screen. I hope we see more in the future.
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