Rings of Power: SONIC THE HEDGEHOG 3

I have no defense of Sonic the Hedgehog 3 except that I was once an 11-year-old boy. My adult self sat watching this sequel slightly bored by the shiny, proficient formula on screen. If you’ve seen director Jeff Fowler’s first two Sonic the Hedgehog movies, this will be totally familiar—a simply plotted, gently silly scurry across brightly-lit colorful settings while the super-speedy animated blue hedgehog of Sega video game fame tries to protect his adopted human family, and the world, from the villainous machinations of evil scientist Jim Carrey. These are narratively flimsy, emotionally shallow, predictably told cartoon-logic movies. And yet, sometimes movies like this invite the Ghost of Moviegoer Past to step in and watch instead of the Present for a while. In that spirit, I had a good time. This isn’t even the best Sonic movie—that’s 2 by a nose, a perfectly pleasant pileup of kids’ adventure cliches and a good balance of human funny business. But 3 and the others are movies I would’ve enjoyed as a boy. It has likable leads with a funny ensemble, and a brisk pace with varied and imaginative-enough adventure sequences. This one has an early hedgehog versus motorcycle chase down a busy Tokyo street, and later a fight in a vault with tiles that are randomly anti- or extra-gravity. There’s just enough cleverness there. And then there’s Carrey hamming it up, this time in a double role as the villain and his own grandfather. His antics along with the Sega aesthetics are key 90s throwbacks. Is it any wonder the movie has two of the humans high-five and declare it “best decade ever?”

If the common complaint of the first picture was that it put Sonic in the passenger seat to pleasant live-action family comedy from James Marsden, Tika Sumpter, and Natasha Rothwell, this third Sonic goes the other way. It reduces the humans to glorified cameos and spends most of its time with Sonic (Ben Schwartz) and pals Tails (Colleen O'Shaugnessey) and Knuckles (Idris Elba) on the hunt for an evil hedgehog named Shadow (Keanu Reeves) who escaped containment in a secret base and is rampaging across the world looking for revenge against those who captured him. We get lots of flashbacks explaining why he’s upset, and seeding the ground for his eventual change of heart. (Though weirdly it is unacknowledged how one key character in those flashbacks has to be closely related to a key character in the present.) This series, like Fast and Furious before it, is very good about setting up villains to become sidekicks in future entries. And, better than Marvel lately, knows how to tease a new character in the credits of one entry and pay it off immediately in the next. (And easily incorporates events of a streaming series quickly, too.) This might be the ideal form of the modern franchise: cheap, efficient, reliable quality and return on investment, self-referential and fan-flattering without bogging down in self-seriousness, and exactly as ambitious as its target audience wants. It’ll never be great, but it’s always consistent.  Bring on Sonic 4!

Quick Trip: SONIC THE HEDGEHOG 2

Would I have liked Sonic the Hedgehog 2 when I was 11 years old? Certainly. The whole thing feels built from a checklist of everything an 11-year-old would love. It has: a plucky boyish hero with a bit of an attitude, space critters in different primary colors and with complementary abilities, magic portals, little robots, big robots, video game sound effects, lasers, explosions, fast cars, swimming pools, flatulence, a music montage of home-alone misbehavior, baseball, volleyball, skateboarding, Rube Goldberg machines, a treasure map, ice cream, magic birds, a ruined wedding, secret agents, improbable gadgets, impenetrable lore, video game logic, an avalanche, a hidden temple with booby traps and ancient magic jewels, biplanes, golf carts, a mountain tavern where tough guys have dance-offs, non-threatening military men who say things like “My God!” while staring at clouds of special effects, and a cast that includes Jim Carrey returning to wacky mode as the villain while everyone else is either comic relief or standing around to cheer the heroes on. All of the above is presented brightly and plainly, with total earnestness and jokes only a fifth grader would enjoy. The only problem is that I’m not 11 any more.

The sequel is undeniably leveled up in some ways from the first hit movie based on the classic Sega game starring the eponymous blue super-speedy hedgehog. That one somehow stranded Sonic (voiced by Ben Schwartz) as a passenger on a road trip with a human cop (James Marsden) and his fiancé (Tika Sumpter) for most of the way, though the glowing-portal action sequences and Carrey’s literal mustache twirling like it was 1994 again were reasonably enjoyable. It’s now bigger and louder and more stuffed with character and incident and running around. (Though weirdly Sonic still isn’t consistently using his super speed to its most effective escape potentials.) But it’s also just more of the same, cartoony effects in a formulaic story scurrying around for a couple hours while the score pounds and the subwoofer rumbles before we all learn a valuable lesson about teamwork. Director Jeff Fowler once again does sturdy work framing the live-action and animation, keeping things bright and quick, moving right along. It goes down painlessly. Passable at best, it’s perhaps most interesting for how the first Sonic movie, released February 2020, was the last big blockbuster before the pandemic, and now the filmmakers have managed to make the sequel during it and released as we are hoping to near its end. (Ah, that just leaves war and weather on the apocalypse bingo card.) That gave me the bittersweetly empty feeling that, hey, the world might be ending, but at least we got two reasonably okay Sonic movies. But, you know what they say, you can’t be 11 again.

Before President: SOUTHSIDE WITH YOU

Southside with You is a cute movie about the young Obamas’ first date on a sunny Chicago day in 1989. We know they’ll soon fall in love, and we know in twenty years they’ll be the president and first lady of the United States. The movie knows this, too, but graciously keeps the context mostly subtextual. Its focus is on two sweet, idealistic-but-pragmatic, charismatic young people drawn together over the course of a lovely afternoon, building to nothing more than a first kiss – shot by cinematographer Patrick Scola in a swoony, light-streaked Wong Kar-wai-inspired shot that’s worth the wait – and a lingering promise of a second date. I can’t imagine a film like this – small, romantic, only implicitly political – about any other president’s first date. Though maybe that says more about my imagination than about this film’s particular qualities. Maybe John Waters could make a good dark romantic comedy about Nixon’s wooing his future wife by driving her on dates with other men.

But the Obamas are unlike any past presidential couple. As our first African-American Commander in Chief and First Lady, they have tremendous symbolic importance above and beyond their personal or political qualities. They are history in the making, his election proof our society can overcome our worst impulses, while the reaction from the right – unconscionable obstructionism, fear mongering, lying, and, of course, racism – is proof not all progress is linear. The movie situates the young Obamas as a black man and woman indebted to a cultural context. They are surrounded and informed by notable black voices – a Janet Jackson song under the opening credits, Ernie Barnes paintings in a gallery, an African drum circle in a park, Stevie Wonder and Good Times and Do the Right Thing discussed, and a well-read copy of a Toni Morrison novel cracked open. This is a movie casually but undeniably interested in the legacy that produced the Obamas, and the tradition to which they contribute.

Michelle Obama (then Robinson) emerges as the more overtly political figure in this slice-of-life. They’re colleagues from a law firm out on the town spending time before a local meeting on the southside of Chicago. She talks guardedly but candidly with Barack about her concerns as a black woman in a white man’s firm, the pressures to work twice as hard (at a minimum) to be given the same respect. Even then, she’s marginalized with microagressions. She’s an engaged and ambitious person. Barack is, too. When they arrive at the meeting, the neighborhood is discouraged by a setback in a bid to get a safe community center. Obama holds court, the power of his rhetoric alone enough to turn the dispirited hopeful. (Yes, he can.) Impressed, Michelle asks him afterwards if he ever considered a career in politics. “Maybe,” he says quite seriously, but with the smirk of dramatic irony half hidden in his eyes.

Debut writer-director Richard Tanne’s screenplay often gets an overly aware sense of foreshadowing about its dialogue like that. At one point, Barack talks about his childhood in Hawaii, to which Michelle quips that it sounds “so foreign.” Later she crinkles her nose and declares his extemporaneous speech “professorial.” It goes like that, making sure to include little winks and nods to various talking points from the last eight years. It’s distracting. But otherwise the movie makes no attempt to explicitly bring their futures into the picture. It’s an admirable attempt to warmly contextualize the political as personal, even if the dialogue occasionally errs on the side of sounding like two people trading lines from their Wikipedia pages. But even when the specifics are a bit stilted, the strength of the movie rests on its small scope, charting only the small shifts in affections over the course of a picturesque tour of stunning Chicago backdrops.

The movie is slight and sweet, burbling with the lowest of low-key romance. It’s only a first date, after all. Parker Sawyers (Monsters: Dark Continent) and Tika Sumpter (Get On Up) play the leads, appearing in every scene in a likable acting duet that reveals likeminded people slowly drawing closer through friendship to a tentative, promising intimacy. Sawyers and Sumpter carry the picture through its weaker, more obvious moments. So well cast and capably performed, it’s the sort of based-on-real-people movie where the artifice fades away and it feels like we’re looking at the real thing. From certain angles in certain moments, it looks not like impersonation, but exactly right. It is most powerful as an expression of cultural images and personal history as the two ways they, and we, make sense of our world and our lives’ possibilities. That’s what they talk about – anecdotes, family stories, work troubles, music, movies, dreams, and aspirations – as they learn about each other. And it carries with it the unspoken recognition of the inspirational benefits of where they’ll end up.

Back on Patrol: RIDE ALONG 2

After a woefully underprepared security guard played by Kevin Hart helped his future brother-in-law cop (Ice Cube) take down a big bad guy during a routine job shadow in 2014’s surprise hit comedy Ride Along, he decided to become a police officer, too. Now it’s Ride Along 2, and the talkative, blustering little guy is a rookie cop who really wants his fiancé (Tika Sumpter) to convince her brother to let her needy man go to Miami on a case. She does. So the mismatched pair is together again, this time in a more professional capacity, hot on the trail of a hacker (Ken Jeong) and the drug dealer (Benjamin Bratt) for whom he works. Once again, bland cop mechanics and tepid buddy comedy banter is brought ever so slightly to life through the one-note disjunction between Hart and Cube’s personas. They each get to work a couple of character traits in opposition to the others’ while the plot strands them in a generic detective story that develops lazily.

Deeply uninspired and undercooked, this mediocre and unnecessary movie never makes a good case for itself. The arc of the main relationship – from loud disagreements to begrudging respect – is an exact duplicate of its predecessors, and the journey there is the same dull jumble of thinly developed action beats and repetitive rambling jokey patter. (They’re brothers-in-law, because of the impending wedding, and also they’re in law enforcement. That’s about the funniest it gets.) If the characters were more interesting or entertaining, I suppose I’d be more apt to excuse a passionless, mindless retread. But the screenplay (again by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi) leans hard on the preexisting ideas of who Hart and Cube are, since the first movie didn’t exactly make them much else worth remembering. I still wish they had switched roles way back at the start of this series, making Cube the hyperverbal overconfident guy, and Hart the strong silent type. At least it’d be something different.

But, alas, here we are, with a workmanlike and flavorless film following Hart and Cube through the streets of Miami on an easily solved, but belabored, case. They’re no Bad Boys. We get a generic foot chase (the kind that thinks it’s funny to make the participants bounce off a trampoline and run through people’s houses – stuff like that). Then later a car chase tries to get laughs by intercutting Grand Theft Auto-style video game animation. Other would-be comic action beats include a run-in with an alligator, a car bomb, and shootouts in a nightclub and at the docks. It means well. The location work is functional – sunny and clear – while the action is plain and the comedy and mystery plot are mostly predictable. Returning director Tim Story has a movie that just refuses to think through anything that’s happening, resulting in a halfhearted jumble of cliché. Will the chief (Bruce McGill) threaten to suspend the leads? Will the villain have an inside man? Will women be treated as accessories? All of the above. Duh.

Admirably diverse, so at least it has that going for it, the movie is otherwise routine and uninspired. It’ll contrive a scene for a policewoman played by Olivia Munn to show up to an active crime scene while wearing a sports bra, then not even bother explaining the skimpy reasons why. It’ll include an underdeveloped subplot about a tyrannical wedding planner (Sherri Shepherd). Whatever it takes to shove in an extra stereotype-driven attempt at holding an audience’s attention. There’s so little here. And then there’s the characters’ cavalier approach to guns – shooting at perps, threatening suspects, using the weapons to playact toughness or cover insecurities, treating their job as an extension of a video game. A better comedy could lampoon this mindset (a timely satiric idea) instead of sitting back and snoozing its way through stale cop movie habits. I don’t know about you, but I’m definitely not in the mood for a movie with a comedy sequence involving a jumpy policeman shooting an unarmed person (he doesn’t die, but still…), especially in a totally frivolous and disposable mediocrity like this one.

Cop Out: RIDE ALONG

Ride Along is a fish-out-of-water buddy cop comedy with the theoretically funny twist of one of the bickering cops not being a cop. It’s not exactly a new twist on the formula. We’ve seen that dynamic before, played for laughs in films of all kinds, including Die Hard with a Vengeance. In Ride Along, a wimpy security guard (Kevin Hart) agrees to go on patrol with a tough, no-nonsense, breaking-all-the-rules-because-he-knows-best cop (Ice Cube) because he’s dating the man’s sister (Tika Sumpter) and wants to be seen as worthy. The script, which has been cobbled together by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi (they of R.I.P.D.) with Greg Coolidge and Jason Mantzoukas, runs through the typical buddy comedy clichés, starting with a scene like something from 2010’s The Other Guys and coasting into an investigation that’s reminiscent of last summer’s The Heat. Every step of the way, the movie coasts on the energy of putting two actors playing opposites bouncing off of each other, getting under each other’s skin, and eventually learning to like each other and work well as a team because, come on, it’s what this kind of movie is.

Cube scowls and Hart shrieks as they work their way through a series of comic sequences. It’s everything their screen presences would have you expect. Think for a second about what the movie might’ve been if they switched parts, with the bulky, glowering Cube as the shivering civilian and the diminutive Hart the blustering seen-it-all confident cop. I’m not saying it’d be a better movie – it’d almost certainly be dismissed as miscast – but at least it’d throw a curveball into its stiffly forced wackiness. It limps around on generic plotting while the actors are only as funny as the off-the-shelf parts of the screenplay allow them to be. Hart stammers and hyperventilates and flings himself into physical bits while Cube growls and gets down to business as he tries to get actual work done. As they encounter typical police work – illegally parked vehicles, drunk and disorderly conduct – Cube keeps Hart distracted and humiliated at every turn.

This thin material certainly isn’t helped by how unhelpful Tim Story’s direction is. It’s just not funny – flat, inexpressive and doing absolutely nothing to help punch up the performer’s timing or augment tepidly humorous scenarios with little bits of visual teasing. For a guy who has spent his career shooting comedies (Barbershop and Think Like a Man), action comedies (Taxi), and light action (two almost-instantly forgotten Fantastic Four movies), he has very little action or comedy in his sense of framing. His is a visual sense that’s clean, professional, and wholly impersonal. It’s sturdy I suppose, but when put to use on a script so thuddingly obvious and jokes that are more miss than hit, it’s not enough. A joke in which Hart mistakenly identifies a woman biker as a man could be a funny joke on him, but the way it’s cut together makes it seem all too ugly a joke on her.

Speaking of ugly, Ride Along seems to find gun violence a whole lot funnier than I do. It’s so light and middling a comedy that skirting around its bleaker comedic impulses makes it seem a little on the icky side. Take these two punchlines. One comes after Hart has, in the process of threatening a suspect with a gun, shot a man in the shoulder. He says, “I thought the safety was on!” I’m sorry if an innocent man accidentally shot (even in what is clearly meant to be played off as nonlethal) doesn’t start me laughing. Then there’s a scene in a gun range when Hart shoots a high-powered shotgun and the kick launches him violently backwards into a wall. “Those should be banned!” he wails, the joke seemingly that he’s not tough enough to handle it, what with his knowledge of firearms limited to violent video games. It seems to me the real joke is that, what with our nation’s dysfunctional relationship to firepower, use of such weapons probably should be constrained, and yet that’ll never happen.

For the most part, though, Ride Along is on cruise control, too light and forgettably formulaic to get riled up over one way or the other. It’s not just the tough cop, outmatched wannabe cop, and the sweet, patient, sure to be third-act-threatened girlfriend. There are standard cop movie characters everywhere, like a gruff lieutenant (Bruce McGill), who doesn’t have the turn-over-your-gun-and-badge scene, but might as well have, and two wisecracking partners (John Leguizamo and Bryan Callen) who push along the investigation while Cube’s preoccupied with his prospective brother-in-law’s failings. There’s not a single unpredictable moment in its entirety, up to and including a terrific cameo appearance in the final stretch that’s been spoiled 80 minutes earlier by listing the actor in question in the opening credits. I suppose it would’ve been too much to ask for this autopilot work of formula picture to have even one welcome surprise.