Sonic the Hedgehog 3 ★★☆☆☆
This film could maybe be salvaged but cutting out twenty minutes of Jim Carrey’s screentime and all the tone-ruining pop culture reference-based quips. That would remove most of the humour but also there is only one joke in the entire film that made me laugh so it wouldn’t be much of a loss.
That said, the dialogue and editing of this movie is already jarring enough as it is. Conversations do not flow at all, people spout things that have little relation to what was just said or have extended gag reactions that kill the pace of conversation before just being completely ignored. Actually, cutting those would probably also help.
The exception to this is when Jim Carrey is acting off Jim Carrey, which they seem to have put remarkably more effort into making feel natural and flowing with the characters interacting, hugging and playing off each other in a way that really sells physical presence despite it being the same guy twice, something that is not extended as much to the CGI animal characters who will very often not appear in frame with the people they are talking to at all. It’s a kind of maddening how much it feels like so much more effort was put into Jim Carrey sucking himself off.
On the bright side, more than the previous films we do get just Sonic, Tails, Knuckles and Shadow amongst themselves without having to have human characters around and that broadly works! I could have done with, again, less pop culture quips from Sonic and less generic Klingon from Knuckles but these characters are generally fun, they look good, and the action is often cool. This part of the movie actually works and Shadow’s storyline, simple as it is, hits, and the choices made to make Shadow and Sonic parallel each other more works quite well.
The climax would have been pretty great if we could have stayed with it for longer than thirty seconds of a Live & Learn riff at at time before cutting back to Jim Carrey playing generic Jim Carrey character talking to generic Jim Carrey character for several minutes, alas!
Hopefully if they make another one Carrey will not come back out of retirement again.