It feels like eons ago when the first trailer for this movie came out. My friends and I gathered around a tiny phone screen to look at the monstrosity that was the original design for The Blue Devil himself. With his human-like teeth and beady eyes, who could have known just how royally they would mess this up. Being the “so bad it’s good” movie aficionados that we are, my friends and I promptly marked our calendars and impatiently waited to feast our eyes on this garbage fire of a film.

Fast forward a month or so, and the news came out that they were redesigning Mr. Hedgehog. Not only was this the end of my chance of to some potential nightmare fuel, but it was also, more importantly, proof that internet jokes could bully a mega-corporation into forcing their workers to do 90-hour weeks to fix a stupid video game character so that they could all make more money.

Jokes on them though, because this redesign caused my excitement to wane. To my surprise, the redesign looked not bad. I honestly think they did a pretty decent job, especially given how little time it took them. This redesign fiasco actually caused the internet hysteria around this film to shift from the comedians to the conspiracy theorists. People genuinely thought that the original Sonic design was so bad, that it had to be fake, a set up to garner more publicity. People seriously theorized that they had the new design all along, and this was all an elaborate, attention-seeking cover-up. Why people think that any studio executive would be smart enough to hatch that sort of devious plan, let alone keep an entire small workforce of people from leaking this information, is beyond me, but nevertheless, it did get the movie publicity. It generated a sort of morbid curiosity, one that by redesigning the character, vanished almost entirely.

Despite all of this, Sonic had still piqued my interest, that little blue rascal. I said I would see this movie, so I was going to see it. I would’ve preferred to go opening night but didn’t really want to spend my Valentine’s Day with Sonic. Early reviews looked less negative than I figured they would be, and a disturbing thought began to creep into my head: what if it’s not as bad as I actually thought it would be? So I went in with an open mind. I had the pleasure of seeing this movie alone on a Sunday afternoon, in a surprisingly packed theatre filled with an abundance of young Sonic connoisseurs and uninterested parents and grandparents. Needless to say, I was out of place here.

All this being said, Sonic the Hedgehog is the worst kind of bad. It’s stuck in limbo between being “so bad it’s good,” and decent. It’s not terrible enough to laugh at, and it’s not good enough to feel that your time wasn’t wasted. The inoffensiveness of this movie just causes it to be boring. It has an incredibly cookie-cutter plot, to start. It uses almost every comedy movie trope in the book, from the classic freeze-frame in the opening scene “yup, this is me. I bet you’re wondering how I got here” rewind to the real beginning of the story, to a character saying “son of a…” only to be interrupted before he can say the naughty word.

Every plot point, every joke, every musical choice, and every piece of writing is generic and predictable. What could not be predicted, however, was the overt product placement in this film. I know they had to pay for their animators’ overtime, but come on, at least make it a little more subtle than a random aside that has nothing to do with the plot and is completely pointless and out of place. And this happened multiple times! It’s a very unartistic choice and incredibly distracting.

There were many strange choices like this littered throughout the film, such as an offhand mention of Dr. Robotnik being involved in starting the Afghanistan War, or Sonic and his human friend being put on the domestic terrorist list. Sonic does a Fortnite dance, not once, but twice throughout this film’s 100-minute runtime. This movie just screams that it was manufactured by a business who has no interest in Sonic or it’s audience, but is simply using the name as a heartless cash grab. This is simply a factory-made film that could have easily been produced by Eggman’s robots. I’m not even the world’s biggest Sonic fan, but I can see this.

The performances were also all pretty lackluster. I think Ben Schwartz does a decent job voicing Sonic, but James Mardsen and Jim Carrey do not bring a lot to the film. The main couple in the film has almost no chemistry. There’s a comedic relief cop character who is insufferable. The characters themselves are all pretty uninteresting as well. James Marsden is a cop man and Jim Carrey is a loud smart man and everyone else has almost no character. A lot of people seem to think that Carrey did a great job playing Robotnik, but I don’t think he did. Yes he brought energy and spunk to the role, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it was good. I didn’t feel like he was playing Dr. Eggman (who was written as more of an incel icon than Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker was), I felt like he was playing Jim Carrey with a thesaurus, which was unenjoyable for the most part.

Speaking of jokes, almost none of them landed for me, or any of the children in the theatre to my observation. The line “we don’t like your kind around here” referring to Sonic and his human partner precedes a bar fight. There’s a Hilary Clinton emails joke thrown in there for some reason. Every male adult in this movie acts like a giant man-child and it’s very annoying and not funny. A small child in the audience even poked fun at the quality of one of the jokes. A lot of it was just really outdated internet-based humor that came from old men in a writing room who didn’t know much about what they were talking about. The rest just was not well thought out. The screenplay of this film is also pretty bad. Not much happens, a lot of plot points don’t make sense and the climax felt anticlimactic.

I could nitpick this movie to death. It’s poorly edited and uninteresting in the way it’s shot, but I would like to credit the animators because I do think they did a pretty great job with the situation they were in. It’s hard to work on something for months, if not years, of your life, only for it to be destroyed by everyone. It’s even harder to then have to throw all your work away and restart in an intense time-crunch. The final product looked pretty great too. I think they captured the look of Sonic really well, and although it was, at times, inconsistent, I think they should be proud of the work they did.

All in all, the inoffensiveness of this movie is it’s the biggest downfall. I can’t say that I was disappointed, because it’s a Sonic movie, but still, I don’t like seeing bad movies. Maybe if I had gone with friends, I would have had a better time, but basing this review on my experience alone leaves me at a bad rating. And I know that I seem like a real grump critiquing a movie meant for children, but I think that that is a stigma that needs to be gotten rid of.

There are so many great children’s movies out there, and while I know that I may not have been the target audience for this specific film, is it too much to ask for a little more creativity and love to be put into these movies? Nowadays, all we seem to get in this medium are sequels, remakes, and really plain, dumb movies. I think the children out there deserve better than cookie-cutter cash grabs like this. 3/10.