A cheesy, disappointing end to a truly brilliant movie series

Rating: 4/10 (2 April 2014)

Very disappointing. I've watched every single Ice Age movie in the cinemas, known the stories backwards, grew up with these characters. The end to the 3rd movie felt completed, like a brilliant trilogy had come to an end. Why, oh why did they feel the need to make another one? Oh, I forgot, the very reason why most films are made these days - money. This movie is a cheap money grabber with good animation. The story was bland and predictable, brilliantly written characters from previous films are given absolutely no character development, barely any good dialog and not nearly as much screen time as they deserve. Instead we are presented with new characters like: Peaches, Manny and Ellie's daughter who is a 'rebellious teen who no one understands', the guy she has a crush on who gets way more screen time than he should because he's voiced by someone famous, other teen mammoths who...have no names and no personality but are also voiced by famous people! There's also an actual villain. Ugh. One of the best things about the Ice Age movies is how they handled villains. They were never main characters - because the story was about Manny, Diego and Sid - but they were cleverly written with brilliant dialog and interesting motives. In this movie we get : a large, pirate monkey. With no motives besides 'being evil' - and not even being epically evil or maliciously evil, just annoying and stupid - this character has no interesting dialog, has no point besides 'being the bad guy' and overall is a stupid, useless, not thought-out, pathetic excuse for a villain and for a character. The only two new characters out of the many, many, many of them (who are introduced for a scene and then are never seen again) are Peaches rodent friend and J- Lo's tiger. Unfortunately they have so little screen time I can't even remember their names. The story is predictable, boring, filled with waaayyy too many plot holes and a disgrace to the other well thought out, interesting and unique plots the other Ice Age movies had. I keep comparing this movie to the other Ice Age films, but even on its own this movie is terrible. There was NO MORALE TO THE STORY. One of the biggest reasons for children's movies is to teach morales or lessons in unique ways. Though a few minor characters redeem themselves, the main characters learn NOTHING. It's pathetic. They used up every single humorous piece of dialog during the ads, so when you went to watch the movie nothing was funny. I guess that served the purpose though, get audiences to the movies to MAKE MONEY! The new characters are terrible, old characters are forgotten about, story is awful, so what was good about this film? Animation. Yes, the animation was nice. Not as brilliant as, say, Disney or Pixar, but still impressive (especially with all the water scenes). The end credits song is good (though was written to show how many famous people were involved with the cast). Basically this movie is a sorry excuse for an end to a brilliant set of movies. Blue Sky studios, please feel ashamed. You made a movie in which you took some of the most beloved childhood characters and did nothing with them, wrote a bunch of pointless other characters, a stupid story and then MADE A BUNCH OF MONEY!