"Ice Age: Continental Drift" is one of the many reasons why I have shied away from going to the movies very often this year

Rating: 6/10 (1 August 2012)

"Ice Age: Continental Drift" is one of the many reasons why I have shied away from going to the movies very often this year. It plants itself into the same realms as "The Grey," becoming yet another 2012 release that I was eagerly looking forward to and ended up bitterly disappointed with. This film, the fourth in the popular animated series about talking prehistoric mammals, maintains the superficial elements that made the "Ice Age" series good in the beginning—the stellar animation—but does not even bother trying with the rest. I adored the original "Ice Age" and enjoyed the second film, "Ice Age: the Meltdown" just as much. The third movie, "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs," was an uninspired bore, and the new film is just barely better. Just barely.
One of my big objections to the third movie was the inclusion of a new character: a child for the two mammoths, Manny and Ellie. My objection was only expanded here. In this new film, their daughter, Peaches, has grown into an adolescent. And like the adolescents we would expect to see in a human-family drama, this character's only motives are disobeying rules, flirting with the boys, and turning on friends for the more 'hip' members of the crowd—or herd, I guess you could say. Anyway, the titular Continental Drift, is caused by none other than Scrat the saber-toothed squirrel, once again planting his acorn in all the wrong places. This time the crack he makes in the earth sends him straight down to the planet's core and causes the continents to split apart. Manny the mammoth, Sid the sloth, and Diego the saber-toothed tiger are swept away on a piece of ice. And here is where the plot becomes insanely strident and uninteresting.
They are captured by pirates.
A group of rogue animals, led by a clawed ape—they break down into a song that stops the movie cold in its tracks—and seconded by a female saber-toothed tiger who Diego takes a mandatory, conventions-forced shine to. This is the second time in which Diego's inner-struggles have been boring and just the most recent of thousands of completely unneeded love interests to penetrate an ongoing film series. Giving Manny a love interest in the second film was almost essential, as it played off a key moment in the original film. But giving Diego, this feisty and hard-as-nails character, a love interest—and the sketchy ways in which they utilize it in the plot—just left me with my hands spread, mouth agape, wondering "Why?" However, these are just idiosyncratic gripes for me. What ultimately wrecks "Ice Age: Continental Drift" is its breakneck pace. This is a movie that seems all too eager to see itself end. Hence why not one plot element, not one gag, not one character, seems to fulfill its duty or purpose. The story leaps and bounds from one spot to another without even bothering to develop a single idea. A key example: at one point in the movie, the pirates and our heroes find themselves marooned on an island. Our heroes find a tribe of marmot-like critters and persuade them to join forces with them. But the dialogue and storytelling is so rushed that we almost don't realize that the only reason these critters are siding with Manny, Diego, and Sid is because some of their comrades have been taken captive. Why? Because the movie, in previous scenes, did not allow enough time for us to identify which strange animals are pirates. As far as I was concerned, those little animals being whipped and forced to carry loot were veteran members of the crew.
The screenplay has "desperate" painted all over it. Popular characters from previous entries, such as the two overly adventurous possum brothers, are reduced to mere cameos, appearing only because it provides better box office appeal that way. There are utterly laugh-less gags such as Peaches the teenage-girl-mammoth snapping back at a friend, "Ethan is not cute! He's hot!" The laughs seem to be aimed for the very youngest of moviegoers. When Scrat the squirrel, who is seldom funny at all this time around, falls into the center of the earth, we get a cartoon-colored diagram of the earth to display it. The previous movies did not rely upon 21st century visual gimmicks (stuff a child would see in their homeroom at elementary school) so the audience could get the idea. Obviously because the filmmakers did not trust parents to come with their kids to the theater, thinking that they have grown tired of the series.
Well, they may be right.
I did like this movie a little more than "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs" because, and perhaps this goes back to its faster pacing, it did seem to have a better sense of adventure and it did not plod all over the place. It just raced around too much. In spite of my negative review, I will admit that it is a harmless piece of kids-movie entertainment, helped by its 88-minute running time. I was not aggravated or in pain as I watched it, nor was I captivated. This will obviously not be the last of the franchise, and "Ice Age 5" or whatever it will be called, will probably be dimmer, shorter, and have less imagination than this one. Sooner or later, they'll be straight to DVD. Remind me next time to stay home when the next one comes out. And frankly, Scrat causing the continents to drift was done better in the ten-minute short "No Time for Nuts" and that short was more entertaining than the last two "Ice Age" movies combined.