The last time we saw Jim Carrey on the big screen was in 2016’s “Dark Crimes,” a disgusting drama that was partly set in a fetishistic Polish brothel where prostitutes were beaten for fun. That dreck seemed to be the end of an era; the collective obituary for Ace Ventura, Truman, the Cable Guy, Bruce Almighty and the rest of Carrey’s classic characters.
But an alien hedgehog has come to the rescue.
Carrey is back in peak comedic form playing the villainous Dr. Robotnik in “Sonic the Hedgehog,” a pleasant new family film based on the old Sega video game. If the title makes you wince, know the movie is a lot better than it deserves to be. You’ll actually care about what happens to the prickly blue dude, even if you never cared about getting to zone seven.
Sonic (voiced by Ben Schwartz), a spunky extraterrestrial who can run at superspeed and emit electricity, has been hiding out from baddies on his home planet in idyllic Green Hills, Mont. But — have you heard? — Earth also has its fair share of evildoers, and when Sonic accidentally causes a blackout across the Pacific Northwest, one comes looking for him: Robotnik.
Carrey’s mad scientist is a mustachioed, wily, anti-social genius who tries to outsmart Sonic with an army of drones and other modern tech. The actor brings back many of his best quirks: that booming laugh, superfast talking, eyebrow acrobatics. Robotnik deserves a spinoff. Sonic evades the crackpot with some help from the local sheriff, Tom (James Marsden), who takes him on a road trip to find his missing bag of gold teleportation rings.
“Sonic the Hedgehog” is very much in conversation with “Pokémon: Detective Pikachu,” which is a sentence Pauline Kael never had to write. Both films take a cute, albeit flat, video game character, toss him in a buddy-cop story and coax out some surprising humanity. For instance, Tom is about to take a job with the San Francisco PD to escape dull Green Hills, but clear-eyed Sonic gives him a renewed appreciation for small-town America. That didn’t happen in the video game.
Director Jeff Fowler’s movie also takes full advantage of Sonic’s speediness for a number of solid jokes. In one of the best scenes, the blue guy sprints to resourcefully win a trucker bar brawl.
However, some things still jabbed at me like a certain animal’s spines. Considering Sonic is already a product, there is a preponderance of product placement here that goes beyond the usual Toyota or carefully placed bottle of Champagne. The film especially leans heavy on gags with tech brands, such as Uber and Apple, which don’t jibe with the character. Why would a naive extraterrestrial hedgehog who innocently refers to the police chief as “doughnut lord” make a joke about Amazon using drones to deliver packages? It’s a kids movie, not “Weekend Update.”
And, even after the much-publicized rejiggering of Sonic’s appearance after online backlash to the movie trailer, the whole movie retains a somewhat twee look like Main Street, USA at Disney World. I’m not saying they should’ve made “Mad Max,” but more reality would’ve raised the stakes. And the spikes.
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