Divalicious Review! How Do The First Two Sonic The Hedgehog Movies Hold Up?

By Caroline Cao | January 1, 2025 | Celebrity & Culture

Who’s the fastest hedgehog around? After seeing Keanu Reeves’s Shadow the Hedgehog debut in Sonic the Hedgehog 3, I binged the Jeff Fowler-directed Sonic the Hedgehog films on Paramount+. I reviewed Knuckles earlier, a comedic spin-off that had more right to be funnier than it was.

It turned out I was an ideal starting course with the zany Knuckles. At its best, as video game adaptations go, the first Sonic the Hedgehog movie, starring the likable Ben Schwartz as Sonic the Hedgehog (who became subject to a publicized VFX makeover after the first trailer after the first design was relentlessly mocked), couldn’t escape being committee-crafted as a generic road trip.

It felt that Jim Carrey’s Robotnik villain shenanigans were the cartoony highlights (and just as funny is Agent Oliver, played by Lee Majdoub, a mook whose devotion to Robotnik crosses into one-sided homoeroticism with an undercurrent of longing). But he often existed in its own pocket of zaniness that the film struggles to match up to.

But that’s where Sonic the Hedgehog 2 picks up the slack, expanding the comfort with the cartoony possibilities with its non-Jim Carrey live-action humans. The’s a brief gag where Sonic recoils at an old lady who knitted a skull into her handiwork as a threat.

The biggest pleasant surprise is a human-focused subplot with Natasha Rothwell as Rachel, sister of Tika Sumpter’s Maddie Wachowski, ends up being an unexpected highlight when her wedding (to Shemar Moore’s Randall Handel) is discovered to be an elaborate G.U.N. plot. Rothwell flexes her comedic chops with such vigor that it belonged in its own movie.

And once Sonic finds his non-human kin, the two-tailed Tails the Fox (Colleen O’Shaughnessey, a charming and well-known dubbing voice actress) and the comedically serious Knuckles the Echidna (Idris Elba), the character comedy rounds out.

In an era of Arcane or Castlevania or Fallout, all different classes of video game adaptations, the live-action Sonic the Hedgehog films don’t necessarily land as a compelling “video game adaptation” out there. But it can be a fun splash in the pool, like playing the games. And maybe that’s cool enough.

The Sonic movies are streaming on Paramount.

Photo credit: Paramount