Sonic The Hedgehog Review: 6 Ups & 4 Downs

Downs...

4. The Embarrassing Product Placement

By far the worst thing about this movie is its absolutely shameless and cringe-worthy approach to product placement.

Despite the production having a relatively sensible $95 million budget, Paramount decided to stuff the film with excessive and embarrassingly obvious shilling for various name brands.

The worst offender by far is Olive Garden, which not only has its slogan name-dropped early in the movie, but literally has its menu praised by a character later in the film.

Though these placements are somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that doesn't really excuse the fact that they don't belong in the film at all.

Elsewhere, there are shockingly on-the-nose callouts for Puma, Fitbit, Optical Illusions, Zillow, and many, many more, giving the film an unfortunate whiff of commodity as much as entertainment.