Sonic The Hedgehog 2 Review: 6 Ups & 4 Downs

Downs...

4. The Excessive Two-Hour Runtime

The first Sonic film clocked in at a spry 99 minutes, and to that end felt like a pacy sprint to the finish - there wasn't an ounce of fat on it as it leapt from one ridiculous scene to the next.

But in the vein of so many sequels to successful films, Sonic 2's attempts to up the ante result in a wildly over-indulgent follow-up that feels as exhausting as it is entertaining at times.

There's no way that any Sonic movie needs to be 122 minutes long.

The key issue is that there's just so much crammed into this film, from the new characters to the balletic action sequences, overabundance of human characters - which we'll expand upon shortly - and also an overbaked attempt to expand the series' overall lore.

Sometimes less is more, but in this case it feels like Paramount saw how surprisingly well-received the original film was and basically let director Fowler do whatever he wanted.