Part of me is still surprised how damn good the Sonic movies have been recently and the franchise within a franchise they’re building up. So I should definitely count my blessings that “Knuckles”, the short series about the echidna who does not know da wae yet, does the BARE MINIMUM to carry that momentum until the end of the year.
It’s cute fluff but it doesn’t last for long.
I can say production design is used both sparingly and accordingly once again without overstaying their welcome but in comparison to the previous Sonic movies, the backdrop for this adventure isn’t as exciting; the flatness of the surrounding environment is apparent and worldbuilding doesn’t feel all expanded or branched out compared to the last time we’ve seen these characters. Camerawork here is pretty basic outside of a couple of specific sequences but it’s still shot relatively well with competent editing to boot; only a few separate sequences I can name where the cinematography sparkles a bit.
The action sequences start off fine enough for a TV-PG mini series but remain uninspired and the cacophony of CGI that bleeds out from the first episode onward matches that of the movies. Now if only they pulled a Detective Pikachu and opted for exaggerated lighting to better mesh with that heightened sense of reality because we don’t get a whole lot of that.
Its foray of protagonists can be pretty zany at times but there’s an obvious Robotnik-shaped hole in the villain department that Rory McCann, Kid Cudi and Ellie Taylor can’t hope to follow; the ramble comedy on both sides though doesn’t make the dialogue all that gripping.
You know exactly what you’re getting with a set-up that begins and ends with buddy cop shenanigans and they harbor mixed results every time depending on the what and how these types of events play out. “Knuckles” harbors no illusions as to what it’s trying to do but the way it goes about achieving those feats are somehow even more surface-level than the movies despite very few brief glimpses of intrigue that make the ride more passable. We don’t get no nuanced exploration of the human psyche here: the story’s cheesy, odd, silly, and can be a little bit cringe worthy when they heighten up the cartoonish silly nature a lot but leaning more into that was always an inevitability and I appreciated the effort to balance that out with making me care about these characters……whenever it can be bothered.
Knuckles is still in that fish-out-of-water phase and it did kind of make sense to pair him with Wade: the seeds were set to have them both bounce off each other and bond over being mentally lost in a world where people only tolerate them and the connection they have with each other gives them both a purpose but the narrative structure couldn’t have made that journey more remedial if it glided for longer than 30 seconds. Its gradually light hearted stuff and the stakes are acceptably low for the six episode duration, yet even those stakes start to dwindle away into a sea of nothingness when paired with characters that have only one or two separate personality traits and most of them act like bloody children….in an expanded universe where human companions treat evolved animals as children needing chaperones. Wade makes for a nice folly to Knuckles’ demeanor but can’t completely anchor all six episodes the same way Tom does in the Sonic films and that mostly boils down to the uneven directorial collaborative vision from Point A to B.
Here, ambition and creativity is heavily scarce, highlighting the limitations of the own live-action hybrid format when done in this fashion. And the way said family drama intertwines with the villains story is laughable with how rushed and second-rate that subplot was to start with.
Also, it has to be said I can’t really look past putting Knuckles on the backburner on his own TV show though. He’s there just enough to where it feels like he’s still a credible part of the overarching narrative at play but I wouldn't want Amy, Rouge or even the Chaotix Team to get overshadowed by unnecessary human characters. Yes, that’s been a long running staple of the Sonic series by this point but this is something they need to actively balance better going forward; the formula has to start evolving a little bit.
It’s not really worth getting pissed about though, is it? At least as long as this isn’t the same quality we’ll get with Sonic 3. GOD, I hope not.
