Clichés.... clichés everywhere!

Rating: 2/10 (8 December 2012)

Just wow... I give it a two because the animation is still really nice. I would have given it 3 if it wasn't for Queen Latifah forcing every single line with no ounce of passion in it.
How did they manage to cram so many clichés into this movie? By the start, you could already tell how plenty of the things would end up. You knew Peaches would like Louis the best, you knew Shera would somehow end up with Diego again, you knew Peaches wouldn't end up with Ethan... why do I even bother listing it - there was not one single surprise in this movie! The clichés are not only predictable, but so painfully obvious that it feels like you are watching a completely different movie. Did I put in the wrong DVD? I'm pretty sure it didn't say "Teenage Drama 4-ever" on the cover.
The characters had zero development to their character. In the other movies, I felt plenty of the characters had great development. What happened here? Did the screenwriters just want to come up with something for the characters to do for the duration of the movie? Why not try to do an actual spin on the cliché "I insulted my father just before he went missing, the last thing he will remember is our argument, boo-hoo!" - instead you've watched the same conclusion in at least 5 other movies. Captain Gut (who I kept calling Davy Jones) is nothing but an clichéd evil character. No back-story, no development. Just an angry monkey.
The movie also left the impression that the writers were so out of ideas that they just decided to make references to other movies. And who knows, maybe they just picked a few scenes from other movies and animated them with their own characters, seeing as the characters has absolutely no development at all.
This is 2012, but it felt like watching a movie from 1992!
There's also huge inconsistencies in the movie, like how Manny can be sucked up a tornado and fall over a hundred meters, yet a single snowball can knock him unconscious. Davy Jones spends literally hours building a boat to ride the currents and when he gets it stolen, he just breaks a big block of ice from a wall and has some narwhals pushing it. Why didn't he do this in the beginning?
I did get a few chuckles from the only funny characters in the movie. The grandma, although a walking cliché, was a comic relief between the serious main cast. The Elephant Seal was also entertaining, just because he was so jolly all the time while being so stupid. I normally find the two possums annoying, but here I was literally begging them to come back on screen! In conclusion: The drama made me want to claw my ears off, the jokes are few and far between. The animation is nice, while the voice work sounds extremely forced.