Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs is about as luke warm and formulaic as successful family film can be served. With the tone of a 94 minute Saturday morning cartoon you can’t expect a lot. Watching a movie like Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs in the age of Pixar makes me ask myself – What’s the point? It has little heart and moves at a pace that dangerously flirts with losing your attention, but I’m definitely not the target audience for movies like this. While modern family entertainment has proved it can be relevant for children and adults alike — Do I even need to say Pixar again? — the target audience for the Ice Age series is definitely below the 5th grade reading level. The franchise is in danger of becoming as relevant as the Land Before Time series. Remember that? I believe we’re on Land Before Time XIII now. Bottom line is will your kids enjoy it? The answer is yes. Should you see this movie in the theatre if you don’t have any kids? The answer is most assuredly no. If you’re having a craving for mildly entertaining animation save your $15 to $20 and tune into Nickelodeon.
Check out the rest of the review after the jump.
The gang is off to a rocky start as the looming parenthood of the mammoth couple Manny (voice by Ray Romano) and Ellie (voice by Queen Latifah) is changing the usual dynamic and causing the adventures and antics of the group to settle down. Diego the sabre-tooth tiger (voice by Dennis Leary) decides family life isn’t for him and he must leave the group and Sid the sloth (voice by John Leguizamo) reluctantly follows suit. Just when you begin to wonder if there is going to be any resemblance of a plot or if we are beginning an animated extinct animal edition of Everybody Loves Raymond the plot finally arrives: Sid discovered three eggs in an ice cave and decides to adopt them as his own. The eggs subsequently hatch and to everyone’s surprise, especially the viewer who has any basic knowledge of science and history, three baby T-Rex dinosaurs are brought into the world. Shortly after that the newborns’ true mother arrives to bring them back to their world as well as scare and confuse the hell out of everyone else. “Their world?” you might be asking? I thought you would. There is a giant implausible anachronistic world of tropical weather and dinosaurs beneath the roughly one foot of ice that separates the rest of the world above that is currently in an ice age and hundreds if not thousands of years further in the natural timeline where dinosaurs are extinct. Is your scientific mind reeling with questions and impossibilities? Just stop yourself there because this isn’t science class — we’ve ventured into a 5-year-old’s imagination. It is a children’s movie so they aren’t doing something illegal with this complete disregard for science; however, it’s a little peculiar considering the previous movies were kind of set in a plausible historical and scientific foundation. In the confusion Sid is taken to the dinosaur underworld by the mother T-Rex and the unexpected inevitable rescue mission is set into motion.
There is decent excitement and mild laughs but I hardly heard any laughter from the theatre near full of children. It sticks to the slap-stick school of comedy and succeeds to a point but falls into a weird gray area where something is funny but doesn’t really elicit a reaction. It also attempted to put into some humor for the parents brought along to the event but fell flat where other animated features have been so successful. I was even frankly a little off-put by some of the adult directed quips. In one instance Sid tries to milk a large buffalo like creature only to discover it was actually a male and Buck (voice by Simon Pegg), the new addition to the gang in Dawn of the Dinosaurs and nearly the only thing of colorful character and interest, has a remark where he boasts about using a sharpened clam shell to turn a T-Rex into a T-Rachel. There was even a failed joke about homosexuality where Buck tells the group he used to be friends with a large butterfly they came across “when he was a caterpillar. You know… Before he came out.” I caught the intent of the comedy since to be a successful children’s movie these days it also has to be universal and appeal to all audiences but it just really fell flat and seemed a little out of place. I think the level of comedy was perfectly summed up by the near silence in the room and the reaction of my daughter that I brought along for the viewing. I don’t remember her laughing out loud once. She did look up at me and say in a straight face devoid of laughter or smile several times during the movie and say “That was funny” and turn and look back at the screen.
Ultimately I, as an adult, found myself bored more than enjoying it and would not recommend it to those without kids unless you were a big fan of the previous movies. Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs is possibly the strongest film of the trilogy. There was no grandeur or deeply emotional and moving narrative of the Pixar films I’ve become accustomed to but as I said previously this is very specifically a kids movie. Great movie to take your kids to a matinee on the weekend for good wholesome mediocre entertainment. Walking out of the theatre I asked my daughter if she liked the movie. She immediately and confidently said “Yes I really liked it daddy.” Not even 3 seconds later she spotted a poster for UP and pulled hard on my arm to get my attention and excitedly asked me if we could see UP again – for the 3rd time.
Rating: 6 out of 10
Have you seen Ice Age 3? What did you think?