Hey, everyone. Here’s a hunk of good honest rubbish for the festive season. Nobody’s going to mistake Sonic the Hedgehog 3 – or virtually any other video-game adaptation – for something in the “good film” genre. But the series has, through brute force and proud lack of pretension, slowly won me over to what I’ve decided to call its charms.
Little of this has to do with the profoundly irritating protagonist. He is back, still blue and squawky, to counter the character that is to him as Venom was to Spider-Man. Shadow the Hedgehog, a menace in the games since 2001, has sufficient malign gravitas to draw Keanu Reeves in for voice work. He has, apparently, been kept in suspended animation for decades by government boffins and, following inexplicable release, is now set to spread havoc about the planet. Only the wildlife from an era-defining Sega platform game can stop him.
Nobody cares about the plots of these things – just as nobody sensible cares about the plots of video games. We just hope for enough carnivalesque humour among the spinning lights to distract us from the emptiness of existence. “That which does not kill us makes us stronger,” Friedrich Nietzsche famously remarked. It may occasionally irritate, but Sonic the Hedgehog will leave you breathing. It may even cause you to laugh.
Speaking of Nietzsche, what in the name of heaven is Jim Carrey up to here? The Canadian rubber-face reportedly emerged from retirement to play the evil Dr Robotnik and his considerably more horrid grandfather, Gerald Robotnik. There was, with the bushy moustache, already something Nietzschean about that mad scientist, but the greyer, more furrowed relative is a spit of the perspectivist philosopher in his later years.
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Carrey’s antic madness – elsewhere often too much to digest – is just what the Sonic films needed to balance out the digital gloss. He hardly seemed more committed during his millennial give-me-an-Oscar period. Someone get him into a film of Also Sprach Zarathustra right away.
The rest of Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is fine in its breathless way. One could complain about the product placement and the cheap sentiment, but worse things have emerged from the mid-1990s console boom. Much, much worse.
In cinemas from Friday, December 20th
