Sonic the Hedgehog 2 Pitch Meeting | Screen Rant
Warning: Spoilers ahead for Sonic the Hedgehog 2.
Screen Rant's Pitch Meeting series is back with a takedown of Paramount's Sonic the Hedgehog 2. The Sega Games-adapting sequel has its sights on turning into a full-blown franchise, with news of a third film likely imminent after the gangbusters box office return of the film's first weekend in theaters. Beyond that, a Knuckles the Echnida spinoff is already in the works at Paramount+.
The Sonic sequel finds Ben Schwartz returning as the speedy blue hedgehog, who teams up with his video game sidekick, Tails (Colleen O'Shaughnessey), to once again stop Dr. Robotnik (Jim Carrey). Since the first film, Robotnik has been stranded on a mushroom planet when he's rescued by Knuckles (Idris Elba), who appears through a ring portal. Knuckles teams up with Robotnik, who promises to help him find the Master Emerald, which can destroy civilizations. Meanwhile, Sonic's human friends, Tom and Maddie (James Marsden and Tika Sumpter), are off at her sister's wedding in Hawaii in a generally overstuffed subplot.
In the new installment of Pitch Meeting, host Ryan George has a blast dissecting the fresh-off-the-presses film. The main takeaway from this hypothetical meeting at Paramount is that Sonic 2 opens a lot more questions than it has any interest in answering. The full video can be seen below:
The video takes plenty of jabs, mostly at the film's unnecessary plot developments. One such scene is when Sonic is forced to compete in a dance-off against a bar of surly Siberians for possession of an important map, despite being able to move fast enough to make time stand still and just take it. Another baffling development reveals the man marrying Sonic's human sister-in-law is a G.U.N. agent who got into a long-term relationship with her in the hopes of one day capturing Sonic, a development as haphazard as the rest of the film's plotting. And, of course, no video poking fun at the film could be complete without mentioning Sonic's off-putting original design.
Critical praise for Sonic 2 has been mixed to muted, with most noting Carrey's go-for-broke performance and the interplay of the other animated characters as high points. The biggest complaints have been about the needlessly bloated runtime, which essentially crams a romantic comedy into the middle of the story, as the Pitch Meeting video points out. Audiences have been far more effusive in the film's praises, although it's not without its Reddit detractors.
With dated pop culture references dotted throughout, such as Robotnik doing the flossing dance (again) and the aforementioned dance-off set to Bruno Mars' "Uptown Funk," a song that has so saturated pop culture and every wedding/birthday party/bar mitvah/morning show/sports event since it was unleashed from a pop music laboratory in 2014, the film is not immune to drawing from some lazy places. This might be a big-budget kids movie sequel adapting a video game, but that's no excuse to be slapdash. Here's to hoping when the inevitable sequel to Sonic the Hedgehog 2 rolls out, the filmmakers won't be afraid to put a little more thought into the story.
Source: Pitch Meeting