In the Flesh: Sonic the Hedgehog (Patreon)

I walked in on our houseguest (long, irritating story) watching Sonic the Hedgehog earlier this evening and decided to stay for the last forty-five minutes, so now you all get to suffer with me through this incomplete review. First and foremost, Ben Schwartz gives the most obnoxious, charmless voice performance I’ve ever heard. There is not one ounce of genuine emotion or chutzpah in anything he says — it’s like he’s delivering five or six hundred consecutive takes of one of those chirpy, visually antiseptic mid-2010s insurance commercials. He makes Jar-Jar Binks seem thoughtful and unobtrusive, delivering every last one of the movie’s boilerplate zingers with that peppy, nails-on-a-chalkboard whine. 

And speaking of writing, Sonic is first draft garbage right down to the bone, a crossfire of shopworn one-liners delivered with safely ironic smirks and eyebrow raises. Jim Carrey does his best, managing to make hay out of a couple of lukewarm jokes with sheer brute force physical comedy, but it’s a drop of springwater in a sea of slurry. There’s just nothing to the film at all. No sets — every location looks like the little advertisements you see on furniture packaging, the soulless, immaculate rooms that are supposed to help you envision how to place it in your own home —, no music but pale, rubbery retreads of every other blockbuster out there, no visuals that aren’t just a lazy, ugly reworking of something a middle-shelf X-Men movie did eight years ago. 

The movie builds on itself like a migraine, layers of slipshod creative indifference grinding against and over one another. With every sloppily paced scene the sense of bungled waste continues to mount until each new line rebounds from the taut, quivering surface of Sonic’s complete lack of ability to let a moment land. And on top of everything is the plasticized specter of the hedgehog himself, a smooth, slick Chuck E. Cheese animatronic gremlin escaped from his plinth to scurry around at mach 5, his silhouette smeared like a line of blue toothpaste back and forth across the screen. It’s enough to make you wish they’d keep the movie theaters closed.