Animation film voiced by: Ray Romano, Queen Latifah, Denis Leary, Simon Pegg, John Leguizamo, Chris Wedge, and others.
Director: Carlos Saldanha.
Rated: PG
COMING to the screen after Ice Age (2002) and Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006), this third film in the ice-age series continues the story of Manny (voiced in all of the films by Ray Romano), whom we know as the engagingly neurotic woolly mammoth.
Here, Manny has an extended family to look after that is causing him some problems.
He is waiting to be a father, but members of his extended family include Diego (Denis Leary), the sabre-toothed tiger, who is morbidly concerned about losing his identity as an animal that really counts, and Sid (John Leguizamo), a likeable but nervy sloth, who constantly struggles for self-respect and wants his very own family.
Manny is too distracted by his pregnant wife Ellie (Queen Latifah) to cope with them, until Sid steals some dinosaur eggs and mother dinosaur comes to find them.
She grabs them, together with Sid, and returns to her world underneath.
Sid keeps thinking he is needed to parent the baby dinosaurs and he has to be rescued.
In the attempt, everyone ends up in the underground world of the dinosaurs, where the real adventure starts.
In dinosaur world, the group meets Buck (Simon Pegg), a one-eyed, cockney-voiced weasel, who lives among the dinosaurs, and is voiced to great comic effect by Simon Pegg.
The interaction of the dinosaurs with Manny and his extended family make for wonderful action pieces where scenarios are represented as life-and-death struggles that are captured brilliantly in animated style.
Buck is constantly mounting rescue operations that are very adventurous, and there is a particularly impressive sequence where he hi-jacks a flying monster to reach Sid, who is trapped in a sea of molten larva.
The main plot (rescuing Sid) is full of minor twists that are there to entertain.
Scrat (Chris Wedge), for instance, returns to keep looking for his eternal acorn, but falls in love with an equally competitive squirrel, who wants it just as much as he does.
All the characters in the film are voiced engagingly.
Ray Romano, who gave us the much- loved Raymond in the comedy TV classic, Everybody Loves Raymond, brings his well practiced style of wit and sarcasm to bear on Manny in ways that greatly enliven his character.
This third version is more spectacular than its predecessors and the dinosaur environment allows for an ever-increasing range of characters, like Buck, to be introduced to the plot-line.
The spectacle would be enhanced vividly by the 3-D version of the film that is around.
But no matter how the film is seen, there is a wonderful combination of hyperactivity and comic action among the characters that makes for highly enjoyable family viewing.
Adults will appreciate the witty patter, especially by Manny, and children will enjoy the adventurous interactions among the various characters.
The film at times descends disappointingly into crude humour that isn’t necessary to sustain the movie’s overall appeal, but the now-and-again crudity of the dialogue seems to be geared to adults who have brought their children along to the movie, but are looking for something other than what the film mainly delivers.
Often sequels in series disappoint, but this one doesn’t. The values behind the movie are kept intact throughout.
They deal pointedly all the time with protecting friendships, and what caring parents do for their off-spring.
This film is a significant extension of the plot carried by the first two films in the series, but the enhanced story-telling works, and provides many opportunities for action spectacle that are captured very well by the film’s talented animation team.
On the way out of a session, I overheard a very young child saying: “I wonder what the next Ice Age movie will be like.”
One can’t guess its plot, but, to date, the series is going well.
Peter W. Sheehan is an associate of the Australian Catholic Office for Film and Broadcasting.
