Ice Age: The Meltdown
How can Robots be so good and both Ice Age movies be so lame? Sure, both Ice Age movies have good attention to detail insofar as biology and various species-specific jokes, but when the best part of both movies is the non-verbal interstitial episodes of Scrat trying to get his walnut, maybe you should rethink the need for a sequel. I can appreciate that maybe initially the writers were trying to get some kind of global warming thing in there, but they didn’t even take advantage of that topicality.
I felt despondent watching this movie. I didn’t care for these characters that much the first time, and I certainly wasn’t given a new reason to care for them this time. Manny the Mammoth has a genuine existential crisis happening, and occasionally I would get engaged in that story - oh, but now it’s time to cut to some nonsensical set piece which was at best, a time waster (think real live whack-a-mole!) and at worst/best, jarringly bizarre and out of place (a full-on musical number of vultures singing scavenger-oriented parody lyrics to Oliver’s “Food Glorious Food.”). Some of the set pieces had no point to them at all, they seemed designed just to fill the 90 minutes and justify the $8 matinee price. Meanwhile our leads bicker and talk about their herd as if we had invested something into their relationship before.
Maybe you can tell that I am not in the pro-Family Guy camp, and maybe this movie is rollicking good fun to that demographic, but even when I am bored by the jokes on the TV show, I have a storyline to follow in the meantime. The Meltdown just lurches back and forth from some peril-that-isn’t-scary to Scrat’s Charlie Chaplinesque adventures.
Ice Age: The Meltdown (no 2?) has vastly improved the animation since Ice Age - the fur looks rich and tactile, the ice translucent and cold. But Robots came out just last year and it is both better written and significantly better animated. What gives? Meltdown does escape the Chicken Little trap up just jabber jabber jabber pop culture references, thankfully largely due to its setting, but it does have its characters sniping and fighting and mocking each other in lieu of any other kind of plot movement. Finally Queen Latifah shows up with her unique brand of magic and energy, and we have a moment of amusing self delusion that goes on too long; when the problem gets sorted out, it’s too late. I did enjoy her relationship with her possum companions, it was the most real thing in the movie.
Adult fans of animation: don’t bother. Parents taking their kids: Spare them. Use the money to beef up your home DVD collection of Pixar titles or even expand into the old Warner Brothers cartoons. Better than to reveal to them that adult moviemakers don’t care about making movies worth watching.
MPAA Rating PG
Release date 3/31/06
Time in minutes 90
Director Carlos Saldanha
Studio 20th Century Fox
