The Sonic movies have been an interesting venture to say the least. From the first movie, as most people were about to guess from the first abysmal trailer where they gave Sonic human teeth, the film franchise should've feel on its face even more so than, well, the video game franchise. It was a standard car trip formula that's plagued other family-friendly ventures (See Hop... Or rather, don't), so people were guessing from the get-go that it was going to flop.
Shockingly, though, the films managed to find a perfect way to adapt these characters, personalities and all (something that's especially rare for video game adaptations), and make their interactions with Earth an interesting line of dominoes to see get knocked over. They were partially fish-out-of-water stories, but they were less about what the characters could learn about our world and more about what they could bring to our world, which is probably how the second film especially managed to adapt much closer to the games than anyone probably would've expected from another down-to-Earth story.
This is where, in my honest opinion, Knuckles, the latest desperate attempt from Paramount to get subscribers on Paramount Plus (something I dishearteningly say as one of their long-time subscribers), falls short. Whereas the other films managed to find things that characters like Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and Robotnik could bring to the world they encompass, Knuckles as character brings far, far too little to this world and, something I should never say about a series with his freakin name on it, could've been cut out.
The strange thing is, though, it doesn't really start that way. The series kicks off with Knuckles, played again by Idris Elba, gets grounded after a few failed attempts to "make himself at home" end up causing suburban chaos. But then he gets a calling from his deceased tribe leader, played by Christopher Lloyd, to train up an apprentice in the ways of the warrior. (BTW, one thing I'll give this series credit for is introducing me to that awesome Patty Smyth song that plays in the series' intro.)
He finds this apprentice in the form of Wade, another carry-over from the movies played by Adam Pally. He's attempting to train up for an upcoming bowling tournament in Reno, Nevada. Knuckles decides to take this opportunity to train up Wade in the ways of the warrior to give him the strength and confidence he needs to win.
Much like the movies, in the series, once again to my surprise, Knuckles' personality doesn't really need to veer in order for that to happen. He understands pretty naturally why the bowling alley is essentially Wade's battleground (like, there's a scene where Knuckles gets a "strike" that had me in stitches), his philosophies on what it takes to be a warrior stay pretty well in-tact, and when he is in the plot, it is still interesting to see him interact with the world around him.
And that, unfortunately, is the problem. He's barely in the plot.
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The first episode does a pretty good job of integrating him fluently. It opens with him training in the forest, he does his usual thing which, like I said earlier, causes suburban chaos, he gets his calling, and then he meets up with Wade to train him in the warrior ways. It seems like it's going to take the route of the movies of focusing on the character's interactions with the world around him, unlike something like the Michael Bay Transformers movies where they distract from the plot with tired, cliched plotlines.
And then it does exactly that.
I'm not kidding when I say that Knuckles has less and less involvement with the story as the series goes on. He spends most of the second episode in a box, the third episode being sidelined at a dinner table while Wade has a heated argument with his bratty sister, and the final episode in a battle with a giant robot OFF-SCREEN during Wade's big bowling tournament! By the fifth episode, even the Wade-becoming-a-warrior plotline becomes less of the story as much as Wade rekindling his relationship with his jerk-wad father, and would it even be much of a spoiler to say he betrays him? Meanwhile, Knuckles is in a hotel room. Words cannot describe how much of a fail that is.
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Don't get me wrong, the other Sonic movies had heavy involvement from the humans too (I made a joke in a video about a year and a half ago about how scenes of a wedding in Hawaii in the second movie were like those cut scenes a game wouldn't let you skip), but they never veered their focus the way this series does. They were still about Sonic and Tails and Knuckles, their interactions with the world around them and what they brought were still a huge part of each story, and the majority of each movie, especially the second one, knew what to give us. This has so much of an annoying focus on Wade and his family and his lame bowling tournament that it feels less like Sonic Adventure's cut scenes and more like Metroid Other M's cut scenes.
My only guess with this is that it was a financial issue. Paramount's been going through some heavy financial issues lately, especially with Paramount Plus (they reported a drop in revenue from $25 billion to $8 billion just yesterday and blame the whole thing on Paramount Plus), and the effects to bring a character like Knuckles to the big screen are, from my understanding, pretty doggone expensive, and I'm guessing they realized that somewhere down the line of developing the series and decided to shift the focus to something less expensive.
Honestly, though, if they needed to justify any rising costs, they should've just made it a movie and released it in theaters. A lot of the Wade family stuff could've been cut, you could've put more of a focus on Knuckles training Wade in the ways of the warrior, and you could've added more action scenes with Knuckles punching the crap out of the bounty hunters coming after him (Did I forget to mention that?). To be honest, this cinematic quality on streaming really should've never been popularized in the first place, as it's a pretty hard cost to justify.
As a series, it falls completely flat. It becomes less interesting with each episode, it takes the focus away from the character and scenarios that people were probably expecting from the trailer (or even the freakin title), and it did the one thing that no spin-off of any film franchise should ever do... It made me question for a second if the films were ever truly good in the first place. (I did decide that they still were, but that's beside the point.) I still have hope for Sonic the Hedgehog 3, one bad series isn't going to throw that off, but much like a lot of their other original content, it does put some bloody you-know-what on Paramount Plus as a service.
