[Movie 304 / Day 324]
The original ICE AGE was fun. It was the story of how an unlikely group of animals (a sloth, woolly mammoth, sabre toothed tiger) came to be friends and regard themselves as family. Unfortunately, ICE AGE 2: THE MELTDOWN wasn’t nearly as good. The humour seemed to go off the boil somewhat and, frankly, I didn’t really care for the new characters overly – the best thing by far was the subplot concerning the acorn-obsessed Scrat who, like in the original, seemed perfectly judged to be funny but having little enough screen-time that you were left wanting more.
ICE AGE 3 picks up where 2 left off and, if I’m being honest, I wasn’t overly looking forward to it. And, to start with, I wasn’t digging it overly. The whole family dynamic was OK, but nothing particularly exciting and – big whoop – Ellie (the female woolly mammoth) is pregnant. It got better when John Leguizamo’s broody Sid (the sloth) finds a trio of eggs and decides to nurture them as his own. When they hatch however, it turns out they contain T-Rex babies and – shock horror! – the mother T-Rex wants them back and she’s not best pleased, taking babies and Sid back to her lair. And that’s where the interest level ramped up again, as Ellie and Manny (the male mammoth), along with rat things Crash and Eddie, follow mummy dinosaur down into the Lost World type place under the ice. As they follow Sid’s trail, they meet Simon Pegg’s one-eyed crazy weasel Buck and the movie really starts (Pegg has done a good job on the voice; I didn’t know it was him until the credits rolled). From this point on, it’s more-or-less Buck’s show as he guides the rest of the gang through the treacherous regions of the Lost World, tracking the T-Rex and generally acting like a lunatic. We discover that Buck lost his eye in a tussle with the biggest, meanest dinosaur of them all, Rudy; and that the crazy weasel is hunting his nemesis down.
Scrat makes his obligatory appearance; but unfortunately the film-makers decided to build his little skits to a proper subplot, involving a female of the species called Scratte. Some of it is still as hilarious as the earlier movies, but it does get a touch bogged down in the middle. It seems, at least where Scrat’s involvement in the plot is concerned, that less really is more. So oddly, the problems with ICE AGE 3 are a reversal of the problems with 2 – the new characters carry the film and Scrat isn’t as likeable.
For this episode, the adult humour seems to have been ramped up a bit with some definitely risqué jokes. Still, it is a kids movie and as such, nobody dies and the ending is definitely on the happy side. And for a family movie, that’s ideal. My kids loved it, containing the right mix of funny stuff and slightly scary stuff and a short-attention-span-friendly runtime. After the initial disinterest in another ICE AGE flick, I too got into it and ended up really enjoying it, despite it’s shortcomings – it’s a fun flick to watch with your family; although still not quite up to the level of most of Pixar’s output…
My Rating: 
[ IMDB rating: 7.1 / 10 | IMDB link | Running time: 94 mins ]
