Make Altered Beast, you cowards!

I appreciate that Sonic The Hedgehog: The Movie wasn't total trash. I mean, it wasn't good by any objective measure, it was just, I don't know, inoffensive? 

Well, once they fixed whatever is going on here on the left anyway...

"Harumph."

-Andy Rooney

It promised one and a half hours of Ben Schwartz quipping and Jim Carey mugging and gave us exactly that. Cool. And it probably didn't hurt that it released during the pandemic when the only other thing to do was hope you didn't catch a respiratory disease. Oh, or catch up on the thirty of forty billion other things on streaming television right now. Which, I mean, doesn't anyone read anymore? And whatever happened to big band music? And have you noticed that everything costs more than--shit, sorry, I was Rooney-ing. Yes again. Where was I?

Right, Sonic the Hedgehog. It made a ton of money and so now there's a sequel with Idris Elba as Knuckles. On the surface it sounds ridiculous that some nonsense kids movie would get someone of Elba's caliber, but Orson Wells once played Unicron so nothing, nothing should surprise us anymore.

Pictured: The guy that gave us Citizen Kane, seen
here voicing a cartoon robot who eats planets. 

Above: the tower of hubris that marked the
beginning of Sega's downward spiral.

Anyway, I guess the sequel has done quite well, and now Sega is planning--you remember Sega, right? The video game company that once broke Nintendo's monopoly of the U.S. video game market and then through an almost comical series of dumb decisions slowly collapsed in on itself? Yeah, that's them. And now they're so drunk on the Sonic film's success, they've hired John Wick screen writer Derek Kolstad to adapt Streets of Rage as a movie. Yeah, Streets of Rage.

Incidentally, on behalf of all kids in the 90's,
I'd like to apologize for the clothes and haircuts.

"What's Streets of Rage?" you might ask? Why it's a series of side scrolling beat'em ups that was super popular among Sega fans in the 90's. "What's a beat'em up?" You might further inquire? It's a genre of video game where players move from one side of the screen to the other fighting wave after wave of foes--usually street thugs. Think Double Dragon or Final Fight, although Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Simpsons were pretty famous examples of these. Chances are if you were a kid in the 90's, you played one of these in an arcade at some point.

Oh right. Money. Money gave them the idea.

They're not exactly known for their in-depth story lines. Like, the plot of Streets of Rage is that a crime syndicate led by Mr. X--no, really--has taken over and three ex-cops absurdly named Adam Hunter, Axel Stone, and Blaze Fielding must walk slowly to the left for like eight levels. That's it. Now, I was surprised at how much I liked John Wick despite kind of hating that kind of movie, so if anyone can turn that poppycock into a ninety-minute summer movie, Derek Kolstad can, but what even gave Sega's executives the idea that anyone should have to try?

For every Detective Pikachu there's a Mortal Kombat Annihilation. Video game adaptations are more often miss than hit and I'm not sure the success of Sonic necessarily translates into success for anything based on the Sega name alone. Like, with Marvel movies, the logic was if people liked Ironman, maybe they'll like Thor, and yeah, sure, we did. But there's a long walk from funny CG hedgehog to gritty crime movie about three martial artists with porn names beating up goons. 

Admittedly Sonic wasn't exactly Hamlet, but are
we ready for an hour and a half of this?