Not at all bad. Not the best, but not at all bad

Rating: Null/10 (1 March 2002)

Ice Age is the latest computer animated film to come down the pipe and is certainly a pleasant way to spend time staring at the big screen while transferring popcorn to your mouth.
The story is simplistic (a mammoth, a sabre-toothed tiger and a sloth return a lost baby to its tribe) and appeals more to younger children, lacking the multi-layered depth of Shrek and even Monsters Inc. Not that it's boring. Indeed, there is some stand-out stuff, such as the running gag with the squirrel and the priceless sequence with the dodo's. This latter is not only laugh-aloud funny, but qualitatively even seems lifted from another production altogether. As if often the case, you can tell some scenes had more care, attention, and most likely money, lavished on them than others.
In technical terms, Ice Age breaks no new ground and the script and characterisation, as well as the animation, also lag behind Shrek and Monsters Inc. The fact of the matter is, these two films, have now raised the bar so high they are very hard acts to follow.
The children who were at the press screening I attended certainly sat attentively (but they are German and their teacher had threatened them with massive death if they so much as ... ) and did laugh a few times.
Ice Age certainly qualifies as a good family film and if it gets the kids' minds off the latest Harry Potter merchandise then that's a relief to parents everywhere.
Where the film suffers, though, is the appalling voice performance of Ray Romano as Manfred the Mammoth. He sounds like John Ratzenberger (Cliff the mailman from Cheers), only drugged, depressed and telephoning in his lines. Literally!
Romano might be a name in the US, but anywhere else? So what if he stars in Everybody Loves Raymond? (And what kind of suspicious title is that? "Whaddya mean you don't love Raymond?! What's wrong wit yer?! You some kinda commie?!"). To most of the world he's Ray Who and it's I've Never Heard of Raymond, Haven't Seen The Show and Care Even Less.
OK, so the film will be dubbed, or at least subtitled, outside english-speaking territories, but his performance is so bad as to seriously drag it down. It's thanks to John Leguizamo, as Sid the Sloth, that the energy isn't so sucked out of you that you dissolve in your seat and slide, a shapeless blob, to the floor. I've thought long and hard about when I last heard such a miscast cartoon voice and still haven't come up with one.