Sonic the Hedgehog
The first live-action movie starring Ben Schwartz as Sonic could have been a lot worse if it had the original, horrifying character design seen in its first trailer. The movie we got in 2020 isn’t perfect, and is, in many ways, a deeply frustrating adaptation for the same reasons the Knuckles show is. It has a lot of annoying product placement, it leans on pop culture references as one of its only sources of comedy, and while it’s not as lopsided as Knuckles, there’s still a lot of time spent on human characters other than Jim Carrey’s Dr. Robotnik. But elements like Carrey’s performance and some genuinely endearing moments for our titular hero help prop it up. Altogether, it’s a better “kids film” than some of the worst, most time-wasting nonsense that exists strictly to keep a kid looking at a screen for an hour and a half. It still feels distanced from the source material, but the second film would certainly improve that two years later.
