Sonic the Hedgehog 3: When the Good Guys Need a Villain's Help
I'll admit I went in expecting another breezy kids' romp with Jim Carrey mugging for the camera, and I came out surprised by how much weight Shadow actually brought to the thing.
The setup: fifty years back, a secret government program run by Professor Gerald Robotnik — yes, Ivo's grandfather, also Carrey, because why stop at one — builds an "Ultimate Life Form" using alien tech, loses control of it, and gets shut down hard. When that creation, Shadow, finally wakes up, he's got a grudge the size of the moon and zero interest in explaining it before throwing hands. Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles get outclassed almost immediately, and watching them get humbled enough to form an uneasy truce with Robotnik is such a simple move, but it completely recontextualizes the franchise.
Keanu Reeves voicing Shadow shouldn't have worked as well as it did. That flat, clipped delivery usually reads as miscasting, but here it plays as a guy who's spent decades alone with nothing but his anger — every line sounds like it costs him something.
The real engine of the movie, though, is Carrey playing against himself. Gerald isn't just "sad Robotnik" — he's a grief-wrecked old man who lost his granddaughter Maria and has been rebuilding Shadow's purpose around revenge ever since, and Carrey plays that completely straight in a way that makes the comedy hit harder when it shows up. There's a heist scene where both Robotniks have to dance their way past a room full of security lasers to reach the Eclipse Cannon, and it's some of the best pure physical comedy he's done in this franchise — immediately followed by a Shadow/Maria flashback that actually got me, which is not a sentence I expected to write about a Sonic movie.
Setting a chunk of the back half in Tokyo instead of another suburban cul-de-sac also gives the action a different texture — there's a rooftop chase that's genuinely one of the better video-game-movie set pieces out there.
If I've got a complaint, it's that the film is juggling a lot — Shadow's backstory, the Robotnik double act, a corporate subplot that never quite earns its runtime, Team Sonic's own arc — and the middle stretch sags under the weight of all of it. It never loses me, but I felt the seams.
Still, I walked out having more fun than I expected, and that Amy Rose tease in the credits has me actually looking forward to the next one instead of just assuming I'll catch it on Paramount+ eventually. First Sonic movie that felt like it was building toward something instead of just coasting on Carrey.