Sonic The Hedgehog Cert: PG / 99 mins / Dir. Jeff Fowler / Trailer
A disclaimer where it's due: during the early '90s console-wars I was always, if anything, a Mario-kid. This was only because we happened to have Nintendo devices in the house rather than Sega, but the long term knock-on effect of this is that I have precisely zero baggage with Sonic The Hedgehog, other than trailers which did nothing to convince me it was worth seeing.
And while I'd usually affect an air of understated cultural superiority with a subtext of "Hey, the hedgehog can take as long as he likes to arrive, it was the Italian plumber who got the cool movie", there are tribes in the depths of the Amazon rainforest as yet untouched by wider civilisation who know that's not true.
So fair play to director Jeff Fowler for having a crack at this now.
LYING Because it does feel like Sonic The Hedgehog is a screenplay that's been lying on a shelf for a couple of decades, waiting for the technology to catch up and do it justice. The initial pitch of a young alien transported to Earth from his homeworld, too fearful to reveal himself and too shy to make friends, is certainly timeless enough. And that's packaged here by writers Josh Miller and Patrick Casey into a present day, extra-terrestrial hero's journey road trip buddy-com, surprisingly uncomplicated and free of post-modern irony.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of its 2020 unveiling (and certainly the one forgiving its excesses) is that is that Sonic The Hedgehog is a film made unapologetically for kids, rather than the streetwise, retro-loving adults these things are usually aimed at. And when watched with that in mind, it's pretty damned good, never speaking down to its audience but still keeping things pleasingly undemanding. Plot-markers are carefully laid out and called back in, and in the context of the script it all makes relative sense.
HUNGRY The animation for Sonic himself is decent, although his facial contortions aren't quite as expressive as Ben Schwartz's voice performance, which in turn feels slightly too 'old' for a character who's meant to be at the back-end of adolescence. James Marsden*1 puts in a solid role as human sidekick Tom, supported by Tika Sumpter as his long-suffering wife Maddie; effectively the surrogate parents-to-be of this unexpected arrival. The movie looks mostly great, even if there's a part of me that now wants to see the entire thing with the awful Sonic, just out of morbid curiosity.
But a chase is nothing without a pursuer, and Sonic would be nothing without Dr. Robotnik - here, a government-funded black ops stooge played by an old-school-channelling Jim Carrey. Which is a nice way of saying that Jim Carrey is good at being Jim Carrey™, or rather, being that version of Jim Carrey which makes people who don't like Jim Carrey™ avoid all of his work on general principle. Somehow his nostalgic performance feels out of place in a nostalgic adventure. And the number of Carrey's scenes where he appears with no one else in shot - suggesting weeks of solo soundstage filming as he ad-libs material deemed good enough to bulk out the runtime - is quite worrying.
BETTE
And as suggested by the opening of this review, comparisons will inevitably be made to the infamous screen-adaptation of Super Mario Bros. Although in some ways the movie's perhaps closer to Doom - a game which never really had too much of a narrative to begin with, and where the movie version is a passably contrived story that plays out while the audience wait for The Set-Piece Sequences to link visually to its gaming-past. When these arrive in Sonic they're pretty joyous, but it's an ironically slow journey in getting there.
Worth noting though are a couple riffs on the Quicksilver super-slo-mo scenes from new-era X-Men, not least because they're each far better than the second time that series tried to coast on its bullet-time charm.
DICKIE
At a neat 98 minutes, this never outstays its welcome or oversteps its boundaries. Young voices in the room were code-compliant throughout and found the whole thing highly amusing, so Jeff Fowler has clearly done well for his audience.
The only real downside to Sonic The Hedgehog is that it's kinda forgettable, it's certainly disposable and there'll be little in there to bolster repeat viewings. I certainly don't feel the need to watch it again, and that will probably remain the case until the heavily-baited sequel comes knocking. Yet that's a sequel I find myself looking forward to, and I certainly wasn't that person when I sat down in Screen 5 two hours earlier. So the film's done that right, too.
If you're of an age and outlook to suspect that Sonic will be bulldozing over your childhood, then it's certainly true that you won't get the most out of this. Then again, Jeff Fowler hasn't really made it for you, so...
Think of E.T. without the heart and Super Mario Bros without the embarrassment.
Except it's not as bad as that sounds.
If you keep your expectations grounded (despite my positive words), yes.
There won't be a lot of rewatch-value in this unless you're a Sonic-obsessive, in which case you don't need my opinion anyway.
Well this might be the first time I've enjoyed James Marsden in a movie, so...
That's entirely possible.
There isn't.
A couple of very close-calls, though.
Level 1: As well as a clanging-great Obi-Wan Kenobi reference in the first five minutes, that Biker Scout from The Mandalorian is in this.
Exec 1: Mate, I've only got one of the ruddy X-MEN for our film!!
Exec 2: Oh wow, who? You get that Logan?
Exec 1: Well no, it's--
Exec 2: Professor X though, right? That'll be cool--
Exec 1: err no, it's not Prof--
Exec 2:. ..Jean Grey?
Exec 1:.Okay look, the X-Men thing's not really important...
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
The A-word.
It's the bane of cinephiles, everywhere.
That book you love; the comic you remember; the show you used to watch; the game you lost an entire summer playing? Oh, someone's adapted it and it's getting made into a movie! Whether a cause for pre-emptive celebration or foreboding caution, it leads to only one thing: expectation. And expectation is the death of the 'clean' movie-viewing experience; no matter how closely the film sticks to its source material, or how much it tries to distance itself, it will be faced with the hurdle of comparison.
And while the movie industry loves the pre-built marketing buzz of 'now a major motion picture!', they loathe the comparative references which will be made from the first review onwards. Because many punters will expect to get exactly the same reaction from a completely different medium, to a story they already know. And therein lies the problem.
In this monthly series, we'll look back at some of the most respected and best-loved properties which have made the perilous journey to the big screen; often with some controversy, and almost always with far too much hype. This isn't so much a review of the films themselves, more an appraisal of their suitability as an adaptation.
And so we begin with Philip K. Dick's Minority Report, the 1956 short story of a man caught in a system of 'Precrime', whereby a monitored trio of precognitive mutants read the imminent future for cases of murder and treason. The details are then passed on to a dedicated police unit (with an identical set of results passed to the military as a set of 'check and balances'), who are dispatched to arrest the offender before they have a chance to commit the crime. Although in some cases, the offender isn't yet aware that they intend to murder their victim(s). Precrime are almost literally the thought-police.
That's right, I'm starting 2017 by reading about institutionally-sanctioned prejudice in a book from 61 years ago. But I digress…
Bearing in mind that my default approach to sci-fi and speculative fiction is cinematic (rather than literary), my first thought was that the initial setup of the story seems reminiscent of Robocop , with The Establishment focusing more on a pre-emptive deterrent, rather than in-situ engagement of criminals. Not withstanding the obvious flaw in the system (we'll get onto that), the fact remains that with a system of punishment in place that addresses the 'crime' while leaving the victim still alive, Precrime would indeed act as a first-stop deterrent. For murder, at least. The narrative seems to suggest that reports of theft and assault are automatically filtered out of the system, and are presumably picked up by the authorities in the regular manner.
Dick's philosophical time-cruncher is only a forty-two page short story, and - like all the best speculative fiction - isn't so much concerned with the advancement of technology, but more the non-advancing nature of the humans with access to it. At the core of the story, the machines which facilitate the scrying are only tools connected up to the people (albeit 'mutants') at the centre. But then, people are only biological machines, after all. Minority Report is more a brief study of the illusion of free-will, and the margin of error involved when anybody tries to second-guess someone's true motives. Again, cf 2017.
Most of all, I love that the thought-analysing machines in this future state are still printing off slips of card. Can we hold on to that, please?
The central figure one John Anderton, the developer of Precrime and a police commissioner about ten years or so from retirement (so not a young protagonist, something worth bearing in mind for a movie adaptation, I'm sure). In a system where the last recorded murder was over five years ago, its inventor has convinced everyone - including himself - that constant surveillance and preemptive intervention is for the public good. And it's all the more baffling since the one obvious flaw in punishing someone for a fixed crime in a fluid timeline is something which doesn't seem to have occurred to him until he ends up accused of murdering someone he hasn't yet met. Once this happens, the penny seems to come clanging down with ironically startling rapidity.
Even for a 'short' story, Minority Report takes its time in getting round to this caveat, although when it does, Dick's writing is reassuringly self-aware. The tale unfolds into corporate conspiracy, rather than personal vendetta, and the already unclear waters of right and wrong are muddied with the pollutant of 'for the right/wrong reasons'. And while it's nicely compact, this is a story just crying out for expansion.
The book (I'm going to call it that) is good fun and far more accessible than I've found Philip K Dick on previous attempts. I can't help but wonder how 'out of reach' this non-specific future would have seemed in 1956, because in the 2017 of consumer algorithm profiles and social media tracking, Minority Report feels closer than ever...
Oh, I see the Murder Cards™ have been replaced with carved, wooden lottery balls. Makes as much sense as anything, I suppose…
Given an entire plot makeover and with Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise and Colin Farrell, the budget for this adaptation is clearly larger than the starting concept. Thankfully, the film's always more than being A Tom Cruise Movie™, event though the translation's still more generic that it should be. And sure, it's more heavy-handed in its message than the written-version, but that's probably a combination of the larger narrative and the visual storytelling method. The film is less of a philosophical thriller, and more the arch action movie that the cast-list would suggest.
As a plot-device and overall concept, Precrime seemed more practical in the book version of this. Equally overblown and with the same moral stumbling-block of course, but less ostentatious. While the how of the story remains largely the same, screenwriters Scott Frank and Jon Cohen take significant liberties with the who and why. All for the good of the feature-length adaptation, of course.
On the plus side, this is exactly the kind of exploration than the story needs. Although if anything, the film's far longer than it needs to be at just under 2h20m. Minority Report hits the ground running with a show, don't tell methodology, but the extended narrative time means there's a lot of exposition in here, over and above what's really needed. And it's perhaps ironic that for a sci-fi movie, Anderton's newly-added 'broken cop' backstory could have been written by a computer. In what could be the film's signature sequence, it displays the morbid fascination with eyeballs that occurs in other adaptation of Dick's novels (more of those in future entries to this series), but which is absent from the source book (a bit I was looking forward to, if anything).
This film version is set (ie captioned) in 2054, which puts a specific future-date on things, this time round. Although bizarrely, if Cruise's hand-wave-operated computers with translucent holo-displays don't date the movie enough, the Nokia-logo product placement and COPS referencing certainly do.
Overall though, not a bad movie by any means, even if it's a slightly unremarkable one, in the long-run of cinematic history…
It is, although it's more like an idea in longhand; the first, bare-bones draft of a novella. It also feels in places like it was written in an afternoon.
It is. The creative team behind the film have fleshed out the initial idea (warts and all) in ways which allow it to be expanded more fully. Okay, this leads to the potential setbacks of the system being more glaringly obvious, but it's not like everything in the real world's been thoroughly foolproofed, either.
As much as I enjoyed the paper-version, you won't really get much more out of it than just watching the movie. Although, perhaps uniquely, it'll probably take less time to read the book.
I didn't hear one.
Although I wasn't listening out for it, truth be told..
Level 1: Well apart from those police-cruisers which look an awful lot like Jango Fett's Slave 1 ship from Attack of the Clones (2002), the city-scape and assembly-line chase sequences which bear more than a passing resemblance to Attack of the Clones (2002) and John Williams' score which bears more than a passing resemblance to his work on Attack of the Clones (2002)… Lor San Tekka's in this (from the Star Wars in 2015, admittedly).
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
First things first and credit where it's deservedly due: Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 is a PG-rated comedy which is entirely content to be a PG-rated comedy. It's essentially a kids' film with a (mostly) adult cast, and stays well clear of the ongoing frat-pack trend of peppering the script with unnecessary fuck-bombs to earn a more credible 15 Certificate, then throwing in a couple of dick-shots for good measure. In this respect, the film achieves its goals admirably...
…that being said, why has Kevin James waited six years to resurrect his most patronising and insulting character in an unwarranted sequel to a poorly-received original? Well, I'd imagine the short answer to that question involves Money™and the long version revolves around Not Having Any Other Ideas™.
Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 is awful. Bloody awful. The film's first half hour is laboured, the second is tedious, and the third is an insult to everyone who's actually put aside some of their precious life to watch the film. If you think watching a fat man falling over is funny, then Paul Blart 2 has a joke it would like to tell you. Eight times. No seriously, I had to keep a count after seeing four of them in the trailer. Not including deliberate dives and slides, there's a pratfall every eleven minutes, on average. Then there's a sequence in which we're asked to believe that Kevin James would fit inside a suitcase, despite a) it being a regular-sized case, and b) the film having spent the previous hour pointing at James and making fat-jokes.
The film's first act sets up so many callbacks that the third act needs to start after twenty minutes, just to give it time to reel them all back in. Kevin James and Nick Bakay's awkward script limps along with regularly placed gaps, which I imagine are intended to be filled with the rollicking peals of the audience's uncontrollable laughter. These yawning chasms were met by Friday night's audience with a resentful silence. I'm aware that comedy is often entirely subjective, but Paul Blart 2 just isn't funny. Oh, and I didn't watch this in an empty auditorium, by the way. Well, it was empty of mirth, patience and goodwill, but y'know…
Kevin James does that 'cringe-inducing' thing really well. Probably slightly too well, if I'm being honest. Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 is a little like the UK version of The Office. Except with no laughs, no charm, and a fat man falling over every eleven minutes.
Avoid.
Go away.
Go away.
I ACTUALLY HAVE NO IDEA.
*sighs*.
*glares*.
There is. During the 'battle-finale'.
And I'm actually deducting a point for the film besmirching Private Wilhem's name like that.
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
A disclaimer where it's due: during the early '90s console-wars I was always, if anything, a Mario-kid. This was only because we happened to have Nintendo devices in the house rather than Sega, but the long term knock-on effect of this is that I have precisely zero baggage with Sonic The Hedgehog, other than trailers which did nothing to convince me it was worth seeing.
