Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (2024)
By the time Sonic the Hedgehog 3 arrived in cinemas in December 2024, the series had quietly become one of the more reliable video game adaptations in recent memory, which is admittedly a low bar to clear but still worth acknowledging. The franchise is rooted, of course, in SEGA's blue hedgehog, a character who has been running at improbable speeds since 1991 and who spent a long time looking like an unlikely candidate for a successful film series. The first entry's troubled production, which famously included a widely ridiculed character design and a full redesign following fan outcry, became something of a case study in how studios can course-correct when the internet gets sufficiently agitated. That the series recovered and built an audience says something about the goodwill audiences have for the source material. For a sense of where the franchise started, Macca's review of Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) covers that ground well. This third instalment brings a new antagonist into the picture: Shadow, a figure familiar to fans of the games as a darker, more tortured counterpart to Sonic, here framed as a threat powerful enough to force Team Sonic into an unlikely alliance.
Jeff Fowler returns to the director's chair for the third time, having shepherded the franchise from its rocky beginnings into a workable, crowd-pleasing rhythm. The screenplay comes from Pat Casey, Josh Miller and John Whittington, with Casey and Miller having been part of the writing team since the first film, which gives the dialogue a consistency of voice across the series. The production involves a somewhat sprawling consortium of studios: Paramount Pictures distributing, with Original Film, Marza Animation Planet (a Japanese CG studio with deep SEGA ties), SEGA itself and Blur Studio all contributing to the blend of live action and animation that defines the series' visual identity. At 110 minutes, the film sits at a trim and unpretentious length, the kind of runtime that signals a production that knows its audience.
Cinematographer Brandon Trost, whose work tends toward clean, high-contrast images with punchy colour grading, gives the film the kind of glossy sheen you expect from a big Paramount family release, all saturated blues and golds and action sequences that are staged to be legible even at high speed. Editor Al LeVine cuts to a tempo that suits the franchise's hyperactive energy, keeping scenes moving briskly and leaning into the broader comic timing rather than working against it. Tom Holkenborg, also known as Junkie XL, provides the score, and his approach here sits somewhere between propulsive electronic textures and more orchestral swell for the emotional beats, a combination he has applied across a wide range of blockbuster work. The overall package is polished but unremarkable in its craft, doing the job reliably without announcing itself. The cast assembled is worth pausing on. Ben Schwartz voices Sonic with the same manic warmth he has brought to the role throughout, Idris Elba continues as the wonderfully po-faced Knuckles, and Colleen O'Shaughnessey reprises Tails from the games with an easy affection. Keanu Reeves joins as the voice of Shadow, a piece of casting that plays on his established screen persona in ways that are probably quite deliberate. Reeves has made a career in the last decade of playing figures defined by cool detachment and a capacity for sudden, precise violence, as anyone who has followed the John Wick series will know, and that quality translates interestingly to an animated antagonist. And then there is Jim Carrey, handling a double role this time, playing both the returning villain Robotnik and his grandfather. Carrey's willingness to commit fully to broad physical and vocal performance, the quality that made him such an electric presence in films like The Mask and Ace Ventura, is exactly what a franchise like this needs, and doubling the character at least doubles the opportunity for that energy to land.
Three films in, the Sonic series has settled into a formula, and Sonic 3 is where I started to feel the edges of it.
Jeff Fowler is back once more, and everything that made the first two work is still present and correct, but "present and correct" is carrying a fair bit of weight there. This is more of the same, and a little of the shine has come off. The new blood keeps it airborne. Keanu Reeves is a shrewd piece of casting as Shadow, the brooding newcomer, all low-voiced melancholy, and the comic three-way between Sonic, Knuckles and Tails has sharpened into the best running joke the series has going.
And Jim Carrey, handed a double role this time as both Robotnik and his grandfather, is still the reason to turn up; film after film he is the highlight of the whole enterprise, and doubling him only doubles the fun. So there is plenty to enjoy here. And yet the sharpest verdict of the night came not from me but from my son, who got up and wandered off around the halfway mark, and when a Sonic film loses the child in the room you have to take the hint. The energy that looked effortless in the first two is beginning to look like effort.
I still had a decent enough time, and fans of the series, me among them, will find enough to justify the outing. But I would be kidding you if I pretended this did not feel like a franchise easing into a comfortable middle age, coasting a little on goodwill it banked earlier. It lands in the same spot as the last one for me, three and a half stars, though I suspect a fourth will need a fresh trick or two to hold the room the way it used to.
Sonic the Hedgehog 3 sits in a position that many franchise entries eventually find themselves in: appreciated by its existing audience, professionally assembled by a team who clearly know their way around the material, but perhaps running out of road to discover anything genuinely new. The ingredients are good, the execution is competent, and the core cast remains likeable company. Whether a fourth film, if one arrives, can find the fresh angle the series may need is a question worth sitting with. Franchises that coast on charm alone tend to find the goodwill has a limit, and the most honest measure of that limit sometimes comes from the youngest person in the room.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2024 | Watched: 2026-08-12
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (2024) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Sky Go · Now TV Cinema · Paramount+ Amazon Channel
Rent: Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Amazon Prime Video · fuboTV · MGM+ Amazon Channel · Paramount Plus Premium
Rent: JustWatch TV · Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
Affiliate disclosure: Movies With Macca may earn a small commission on purchases or subscriptions started via these links. It costs you nothing extra.
