Jim Carrey’s showboating double-act can’t save Sonic the Hedgehog 3

SONIC THE HEDGEHOG 3 ★★

(PG) 110 minutes

Even by cartoon standards, Sonic the Hedgehog doesn’t look much like a hedgehog. But nor presumably was he ever meant to. When he made his debut as a video game mascot in 1991, his cute-but-edgy look – big eyes, spiky blue mane – hinted his Japanese designers might have taken some cues from characters on The Simpsons, then a brand-new global sensation, as well as from Mickey Mouse.

In his current big-screen incarnation, where he’s voiced by US comic Ben Schwartz, he’s said to be from outer space and resembles a non-canine member of Paw Patrol, fighting crime alongside a couple of fluffy associates of similarly indeterminate species. OK, technically, Knuckles (Idris Elba) is an echidna and Tails (Colleen O’Shaughnessy) is a fox, but I can’t be the only one who had to check the Sonic wiki for confirmation.

We’re also not far from Alvin and the Chipmunks, with a trio of mischievous critters running rings around their human foster dad, played by a more than usually self-effacing James Marsden – a character invented for the part-live-action Sonic movie franchise launched by Paramount in 2020, with Jeff Fowler directing all three films. The real star of the trilogy, however, is Jim Carrey as gurning steampunk mad scientist Dr Ivo Robotnik, otherwise known as Dr Eggman, the long-term villain in the Sonic game world.

In Sonic the Hedgehog 3, Carrey takes on a second role as Dr Robotnik’s lookalike grandpa, which doesn’t especially stretch his talents, though it does double the number of movie characters he’s played this decade. Sonic also now has a doppelganger: Shadow the Hedgehog, voiced by Keanu Reeves, who counters our hero’s brash optimism with a melancholy stemming from his traumatic past.

It’s the kind of cross-cultural mash-up that might be intriguingly baffling if it wasn’t more or less the norm in present-day Hollywood. As if hoping to make a virtue of necessity, Fowler and his writers deliberately boost the tonal contrasts, mixing in earnest homilies (“Listen to your heart”), strained puns, a couple of fleeting bondage gags, a whole lot of Carrey showboating and some central plot elements, including a climax hinged on the threat of global nuclear destruction, that feels curiously morbid for a film aimed in large part at young kids.

Again, this kind of willed delirium was more fun when the same facetiousness wasn’t absolutely everywhere (especially at Marvel). But in a small way the approach does ensure there’s something for everyone. For my part, I’ll say that no film with a cameo by Krysten Ritter as a brusque secret agent is entirely time wasted and that everything else provides an apt context for her gift for looking unimpressed.

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is released in cinemas on December 26.

Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.