Sonic The Hedgehog 3

Is this new Sonic movie as good as the others?

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The Good: This is by far and easily the best of the Sonic movies. From the start, this movie differs itself from the rest in the franchise for being laser focused on the story it wants to tell. In the other movies there were always deviations from the main story (especially with the human characters). This movie knew the exact story it wanted to tell and was focused on that from beginning to end. Along with being focused, the story was paced nearly perfectly. During the other movies I would occasionally lose interest or get distracted by other things while watching, but I was engaged and focused from beginning to end, and that is something I don’t take for granted. Most movies this year have had a lot of pacing issues, and I was so excited to see that this movie really knocked it out of the park.

An addition to the focus and the pacing of the movie, I also thoroughly enjoyed that the movie took itself very seriously. The other Sonic movies spent a little too much time trying to make the movies as “funny” as possible but by doing so had the movie be a little disorganized. This movie, while being PG, is for kids and adults. There are significantly fewer jokes, and the movie allows the tone of the movie to get dark and depressing when talking about Shadow and his backstory.

On top of everything, I’m having a hard time articulating how good the action was. The Sonic action in the first two movies was good, but it kept itself pretty tame for the most part (except for the end of the 2nd one). These action scenes are longer, with longer takes, and they definitely tried to make them as cool as possible for a Sonic movie.

The Meh: The only thing that bothered me occasionally was the animated characters’ speaking not lining up perfectly with the voice acting. While the voice acting was top notch, some of the amination made the voice acting seem slightly off.

Overall: This is genuinely a great addition to the Sonic franchise. I thought the first two movies were just good, but this one genuinely was better than all my expectations. Even if you didn’t care for the first 2, I’d definitely recommend giving this one a try.

Rating: 4.5/5