Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022).

There's an element of the Sonic franchise that began to puzzle me after a while.  I couldn't for the life of me figure out where all those video games were set.  It's not something I ever lost sleep over, or anything.  It was always just one of those vague, free-floating curiosities that cropped into my mind on occasion.  As I think back on my interactions with the Blue Blur, however (infrequent as it might have been), I began to realize a kind of irony taking shape.  It always seemed (to me, at least) that the more artists tried to expand upon the mythos of the games, the greater a sense of complexity began to evolve, at least in terms of the story's setting.  The more I thought it over, it soon became clear of just what kind of stage setting the world's most famous video game speedster belongs to.  Right about now is when a lot of readers are thinking, "How can you not know any of this?  Haven't you been paying attention"?  Well, time for a bit of a re-confession.  I said just a second or two ago that my interactions with the Sonic franchise was infrequent, and I mean every cent of that word.  I've never been what you might call a die-hard gamer.  The last major period in which my attention was focused on platform console entertainment was way back somewhere from 1991 or abouts to, say 94 to 5.  Somewhere along that timeline, my interest in either Sega or Nintendo just began to taper off, and I've never really been back to revisit either ever since.

That's not just a long time ago, it's practically a whole other world, another life.  It also does a good job of establishing my non-gamer credentials.  My understanding of the major franchises came to an end with Sonic and Mario.  There was a brief moment when I was kind of interested in the original Resident Evil 2, yet that went just as quickly as it arrived.  Let that stand as a testament to my lack of place in the Gaming world.  It's a fandom I've never really belonged to, in the end.  I've always been more of an outsider gazing in every now and then.  In fact, now that I think about it, the last time I ever bothered with the world's greatest chili dog fanatic was not with any of the games.  It was with the two kid's TV shows.  I'm talking, of course, about Adventures and Sonic SatAM.  For better, worse, a reversal of the two, or even a little of both, those two incarnations where the last time I ever paid attention to the little speed demon.  I bring these two portrayals up because both were like the main template by which not just me, but fans everywhere viewed the world-building of the games.  The stages, or levels of the original video games were presented as almost the exact opposite of Mario's Mushroom Kingdom.  

In the strictest sense, all we were ever given as players was a series of digitized backgrounds that were just elaborate enough to suggest hints of some kind of undisclosed identity, yet they were also generic enough so that the ambience of one level was allowed to bleed over into another with a seamlessness that made the transition barely noticeable.  It was pretty clear, even to the children at the controls that the original focus of the series was always on platforming first, and story second.  There's nothing so unusual about that.  For the longest time it was little more than just the standard approach that most consoles aimed for.  The thing to keep in mind about both Mario and Sonic is that each character emerged out of the classic era of the video game arcade world.  This was a time when the basic "story" of any game amounted to little more than the threadbarest excuse plot that existed for no other reason than to set things in motion.  In other words, it was gameplay and not plot that was the sole purpose of video games for the longest time.  In many ways, it still is.  Mario, for instance, has mostly managed to cling to it's arcade origins by keeping any semblance of plot simple and to the point.  At the same time, the makers of Sonic seemed a bit more willing to expand on the lore and nature of their creation.

That's part of how the two Hedgehog shows came to be almost at the same time.  For a brief period, Nintendo was even willing to let Mario get in on the act.  It was from Adventures and SatAM that both constant and casual fans (like me), along with average Saturday Morning Audiences in general were given our first ever idea of where our little blue hero came from.  For the longest time, I was always under the impression that Sonic was this extra-terrestrial, along with all of his friends, on a far distant planet named Moebius.  Some viewers might have wondered how human looking figures like the Eggman could exist in this other world, though that one's easily accounted for.  Just imagine them as an alternate version of the Time Lords that never developed TARDIS technology, or the ability to transform, and there you have it, problem solved.  It might not have any bearing on the logic of real life, yet that's the fun of Science Fantasy stories like this.  They're so far removed from the real world, it's like the Imagination has been given carte-blanche to go as far out and wild as it can.  So this was my first introduction to the idea of the World of Sonic the Hedgehog.  For the longest time, that seemed to be all the world-building explanation I was given about the character, and it looked like that would be the only scraps of information we would ever have.  It would also have been all that we needed.

Even the introduction of characters like Knuckles, or McGuffins like the Chaos Emeralds did little to shake things up.  Then, as time went on, more human characters began to play a bigger role in the series, and it began to get a lot harder to tell if the Blue Blur's world was just this other alien planet (which would make a certain amount of Imaginative sense) or were we dealing with this weird, Planet of the Apes style twist, where it turns out the setting was Earth all along (which just raises all sorts of headscratchers).  To be fair, there is a scenario where this kind of revelation can be made to carry dramatic weight.  All you'd have to do is introduce a game with a more plot based design.  All you'd need to do then is create a riff on the above mentioned Charlton Heston story line.  You could write the scenario so that as you complete each level, Sonic and the gamer learns a bit more about the backstory of Moebius, until when you reach the end and discover that Sonic, Tails, and everyone else are living on this technologically re-shaped version of a post-apocalyptic Earth.  That sounds a bit grim to me, yet that's all it would take to set up a perfectly reasonable imaginative explanation for how guys like Sonic and his world came to be.  Then the franchise started transporting all it's characters to the actual Earth.

To say the confusion only deepened for me there is a bit like saying everything about showbiz appears to be in freefall these days.  For whatever reason, somewhere along the line, Sega partnered up with TMS Entertainment to give us the first successful Sonic anime series.  It the one where some BS science accident ends up sending all the main cast of the games up to that point through a wormhole that drops them all straight into the middle of the contemporary modern day, human centric Terra Firma that we call home even outside the make-believe confines of the franchise.  In retrospect, this show might have turned out to be the one installment that was able to create a shift in the nature of the original platformers, in and of themselves.  Even before the premiere of X, there had been Sonic film and video game entries that had tried to incorporate  human characters, or else Class M human-looking aliens that amounted to Homo Sapiens in all but name, and the file numbers scratched off.  These all seemed to have been an effort on Sega's part to try and take their star mascot in a more experimental, plot and lore oriented direction.  However, these early attempts (such as an infamous OVA and a trial console title called Sonic Adventures) did little to move the needle, and the company folded not too long after.

It's therefore interesting to note that the Hedgehog's current owners felt obliged to try and continue with this strategy going forward.  That seems to be how we got the Anime series which transports just about everything to Earth, while the video games themselves appear to have undergone a retcon where Moebius turns out to have just been our own planet all along.  In other words, what we've got on our hands here has been this almost constant, decades long shuffling of the deck with just a handful of the main cast remaining more or less the same in terms of personality and purpose, while always in danger of having their backgrounds, and hence, their motivations changing on a number of levels, while still being the same in essence.  It just goes to beg the question.  Is anyone else reading this as confused as I am?  I get the impression I've stumbled onto one of those classic rabbit holes in video game history.  One where anything like talk of an official, settled canon is almost ludicrous for the game developers involved.  What's remarkable about all of these shenanigans to me is how none of this constant re-arranging of the deck chairs has managed to deliver anything like a permanent sense of damage to the character and brand.  Throughout it all, Sonic and his main friends remain more or less the same.

He's just this Hedgehog with a remarkable ability for speed who goes on various adventures with his two somewhat equally fast friends as they fight a never-ending battle against the machinations of a twisted mad scientist.  And since you come to think of it, with setup as basic and simple of as that, is it really any wonder that the developers and producers have been able to create so many shifts and changes in the backstory while the basic outlines of the cast and crew more or less stand still as they are?  It's pretty clear all of this is on purpose at some level.  Sonic is designed as this one size fits all protagonist.  Someone you are meant to be able take and place in whatever scenario sounds the most profitable regardless of lore and continuity and still be identifiable as himself.  This creates an idea of who Sonic is at his core which is worth exploring in further depth later on in this review.  For now, we'll simply note how this fundamental sense of malleability was to apply even to his transition onto the big screen.  When the first official Sonic film came out way back in 2020, it amounted to yet another reset of the character's backstory.  There was nothing all that novel in the setup of that film's plot.  All it amounts to is a re-using of the basic concept of Sonic X, where the First Speedster of Gaming was born and raised on another planet (presumably Moebius) and due to plot contrivance gets sent to Earth.

The major novelty to be found in how the 2020 film approached its material was in the way it strove to give the protagonist this almost quasi-Spielbergian feel to his exploits.  I'll have to admit, out of all the direction the first movie could have taken, I'm still not sure this affectionate parody of the E.T. setup was what I had in mind.  At the same time, this one aspect of the film might be a pointer to one of the reasons it amounted to such a cozy success upon release.  That's another factor I'll have to discuss when we get into the review proper.  For now, it's enough to note that since the first Sonic Movie was such a big hit, it was inevitable that sooner or later a sequel would makes its way onto screens.  The real question was just how good of a follow up could you make to a film and character like the Blue Blur?

The Desperate Hours (1955).

I'm pretty sure we no longer live in an age of cinema icons.  If we do, then it's even odds that what we've got now is by no means the same thing.  I'm also willing to bet the matinee stars of an older era wouldn't have much of a clue of what to think about our penchant for making trolls like Justin Kjellberg into internet darlings.  They at least had the luxury of living in an analog age.  Back then, none of them had to deal with the level of exposure that we unleash on the people we choose to entertain us today.  I know it's possible to claim that the Golden Age of the Hollywood Star is over for one simple reason.  Most of the names I'm thinking of who fit that title are now almost lost to time.  It seems like just a handful of artists from that era have been able to maintain anything like a genuine pop culture legacy for themselves.  Chief among them are guys like Groucho Marx, John Wayne, or Alfred Hitchcock.  There's another one in that bunch who, as of this writing, is still able to hold an admirable spot somewhere just above 50% in terms of audience awareness and acclaim.  His name is Humphrey Bogart, and unlike a lot of stage names that sound made up, it turns out this was the actual moniker his parents christened him with at birth.  It's kind of a miracle that his legacy has hung around for this long, yet when you look at some of the films he starred in, then even today, it remains just possible to see why a guy like him could become an immortal.

In order to figure out why and how that happened, we still need to back track just a bit.  I think the words of an old documentary (made by the same producer who would give us Gene Wilder in a Chocolate Factory, no less) said it all best.  "Humphrey Bogart brought an unmistakable power and excitement to the screen".  He was the kind of actor who could convey "an innate sense of world-weary toughness", while also suggesting that "underneath lay an innate tenderness".  Another way to put it is to say that Bogart greatest calling card as an actor wasn't just that he was good at playing tough customers.  He was more like an originator of a by now familiar staple: the Tough Guy as this fundamentally Haunted Soul.  As a result, while he is by no means the singular architect of this modern archetype (its origins extend all the way back to the printed page, anyway), there is a sense in which his best work showcases the birth pangs of the kind of protagonist, or anti-hero that Martin Scorsese has gone on to make pretty much the subject of almost every single roll of film he's used.  Bogie was good at being the Lonely Everyman Outcast.  The lug with a surprising amount of hidden depths, and enough demons contained within always ready to stifle and drag his better angels off into the shadows.  To give an idea of what I mean, has anybody seen that one time De Niro directed an actual film?  It was called A Bronx Tale.  Let's just say that Bogie would have been a good fit for the role of Sonny the mobster.

"On the screen and off, Humphrey Bogart had a style that set him apart from his fellow actors".  In truth, though, this seems to have been a talent that he had to work his way towards one grueling role of work at a time.  Like pretty much all of the great artists, there was no easy entrance waiting for him somewhere.  Bogie came to Tinseltown in it's Golden Age a complete nobody, and pretty much had to beg producers and directors to give him even a bit part in whatever project would take him on.  Before that, however, things were almost kind of amusing.  There's a sense in which he was the product of the kind of Big Apple that Scorsese knew and "wrote" about his whole life, just not exactly in the way you might think.  Based on his screen persona alone, you'd probably figure here's this guy whose grown up dirt poor in some flophouse tenement located somewhere in a piece of detritus that used to be known as the Five Points.  It's where he first learned all of life's hard knocks, and how to defend himself against whatever anybody decides to throw at him, to the point where a lot of the bullies cross the street whenever they saw him coming.  Maybe he finds refuge in Broadway's theater district, both as a good place to play hooky in and catch some shut-eye, and as a good way for him to keep out of trouble.

The only catch is, the more this young punk from nowhere hangs out in the aisles, the more the acting bug begins to take a hold of him, and soon that's where it all got started, right?  Well, no, not really.  Not at all in fact.  "Born in New York, in 1899, on Christmas Day.  Humphrey Deforest Bogart is the son of a prominent surgeon.  The screen's future Tough Guy is raised among the cultured and genteel upper middle class.  Bogart's mother, Maude, is a famous commercial artist.  And her baby, Humphrey, is her favorite model.  Her portrait of Bogart at the age of one is widely circulated throughout the nation, and will bring him his first taste of fame.  Over the years, as a commercial model, little Humphrey Bogart gazes angelically from the pages of national magazines, in advertisements for a popular baby food".  So in other words, as strange as it may seem, when we talk about the childhood of Philip Marlowe, we need to get the idea of Mean Streets out of our heads (as difficult as that is to do) and think way more along the lines of The Age of Innocence (Scorsese also claimed that was his most violent picture, for whatever it's worth).  It's the kind of thing you're just not prone to expect from someone like Bogie.

From the look of things, the young punk must have felt the same way soon enough. "By the time he's 18, Bogart rebels against his sheltered home life, and joins the Navy during World War I.  After the War, at 21, Humphrey Bogart decides to become an actor because, he says, "I was born to be indolent, and this was the softest of rackets".  It's the kind of statement which makes me wonder if maybe the punk found out his own ways of getting into trouble even before he joined the Armed Forces,  Whatever the case, the rest of pretty straightforward.  "During the 1920s, on Broadway, Bogart usually plays the romantic juvenile in drawing room comedies.  And reportedly is the first actor to utter the immortal line, "Tennis, anyone"?  Bogart fails to achieve stardom on the stage, and in private life he fails in two short-lived marriages.  But in the midst of these discouraging years on Broadway, he appears as a "lady killer" in his first film in 1929, and starring Ruth Eddings.  It's only an 8 minute Vitaphone short, and like most trivia of it's kind, it soon winds up in studio vaults, forgotten even by film historians.  But this one reeler marks the beginning of one of the great careers in motion pictures.  Hollywood in the early 30s is in the midst of transition to sound pictures.  And many Broadway actors like Humphrey Bogart get a chance in "Talkies".  Bogart, however, is given dreary roles in nearly a dozen minor "epics" like Three on a Match.  Bogart is a flop in Hollywood, and the studios write him off as just another mediocre actor.

"Returning to New York, Bogart finally lands a talked about part in a hit play, The Petrified Forest.  (It's a) part that Hollywood wants Edward G. Robinson to recreate on the screen.  But the play's star, Leslie Howard, refuses to appear in the picture unless his friend Humphrey Bogart can again play the role of Duke Mantee.  Knowing that this is his last chance for success in Hollywood, Bogart will perform with a vengeance".  It turned out to be the role that helped define his cinematic persona in various ways from then on.  In that film, the protagonist declares Bogie's character as "the last of the rugged individualists".  It's one of those lines that almost ends up sounding fated in retrospect.  "Overnight, Bogart has become a sensation, but not a star.  He is assigned as merely a supporting player, the sinister heavy.  And the top salaried stars at Warner Bros., James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson will bump him off in picture after picture.  Bogart takes this kind of fate philosophically.  He says, "The Heavy, full of crime and bitterness, grabs his wounds and talks about death.  The audience is his, and his alone".  Bogart becomes a master at delivering these farewell addresses".  A typical example of such parting wit goes as follows.  "Do me a favor, will ya?  Don't tell them a dame tripped me up".

"Bogart regards most of his films as mediocre affairs.  A proud and sensitive man, he now wants to become a serious actor.  But he finds himself acting futilely in roles far beneath his talent...Bogart says the only reason for making money is so you can tell some bigshot to go to hell.  And he publicly calls one studio boss "A creep".  But in 1941, Bogart finally gets what he wants from his studio.  A starring role, in a first class film, The Maltese Falcon.  Directed by his friend, John Huston, and aided by Sidney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, and Mary Astor, Bogart breaths fire into the role of Sam Spade; a cynical, amoral private eye.  This is the turning point in Bogart's career.  Through the sheer force of his talent he has proven that he is not merely an actor.  After all these years, he has become a star (web)".  There really wasn't much in the way of looking back after that.  Bogie would go on to parlay his natural talents as a thespian in what are now considered to be some of the greatest films ever made.  His is a roster that includes Casablanca, The Big Sleep, To Have and Have Not (that's picture where Bogie met and lost his heart to a his co-star, a girl named Lauren Bacall), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and The Caine Mutiny.  That's a lot of accolades to rack up for oneself in such a short span of a lifetime.  Somehow, Bogart managed to take it all in stride, and was able to create an indelible image in the process.

The film I want to look at today comes from the very tail end of his career.  There's a bit of an almost humorous irony to it as well.  One of his earliest pictures features a subplot with a surprising enough amount of similarities to the picture I have in mind now.  It's a thriller called The Desperate Hours.