..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

Ice Age: The Dawn of the Dinosaurs
Directed by Carlos Saldanha, Mike Thurmeier

Are those Ice Age wedding bells breaking up that old gang of mine? That jolly prehistoric Ice Age wild bunch  composed of a fearsomely popular digitally animated woolly mammoth and his mammoth-babe, a sloth, and a saber-toothed tiger wandering around in some mad cartoon mish-mash of prehistory?
      
Not exactly. But, watching Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, you can feel the original premise, novelty and fun of  the first 2002 Ice Age movie -- which I though was enjoyable and dynamic in a ’50s Looney Tunes-Chock Jones-ish sort of way -- all begin to stretch to the snapping point. The creators, especially the writers, don‘t have many fresh ideas, except to pop in  a feisty little swashbuckling weasel named Buck (Simon Pegg voicing) modeled on Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean -- and to have John Leguizamo’s spazzy sloth Sid go papa-mama-mad at the parenthood of woolly mammoths Manny (Ray Romano) and Ellie (Queen Latifah) and run paternally amok, eggnapping three T. Rex eggs, with predictably dire-dino results.
     
Family fever drenches the entire plot. Even the series’ unfailing scene and credits stealer, acorn-craving squirrelly Scrat (voiced by original co-director Chris Wedge) has a Scratte (Karen Disher), to ring his bells. And the movie‘s big action scene is borrowed from eternal mom Lillian Gish on the ice floes of Way Down East  (and that scene‘s innumerable imitators), a movie D. W. Griffith shot back in 1920. That wasn’t exactly in the Ice Age, but then neither were any dinosaurs.
      
Ice Age doesn’t suffer from the usual malady of big hit movie franchise sequels. It doesn’t repeat the 2002 Ice Age “Three Godfathers” story-line (with Manny, Sid and Denis Leary‘s Diego the Tiger transporting a man-baby back to its people) all over again. Instead, the characters keep progressing and getting on with their lives. We learn what happens when mammoths get lovey-dovey and turn mommy and daddy. New funny animals picked up in Ice Age 2: the Meltdown -- Josh Peck and Seann William Scott as Eddie and Crash, the daffiest possums this side of Pogo‘s drunken uncle Poo-go -- show up and change a little too.
     
And of course the dinosaurs crash in and begin wreaking havoc, though what these dino-dudes are doing in or on the fringes of the Ice Age is anybody‘s guess -- unless they’ve been dropped into a time warp by the Land of the Lost gang.
    
I don’t mean to imply that an animated feature about prehistoric beasts should have the historical verisimilitude of a Discovery Channel documentary. But Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs often feels too domesticated and suburbanite for its own good -- as if we were heading for an Ice Age 4 where Manny and Sid battle it out for P.T.A. president -- which my be why the notably non-family adventurer, Buck the buccaneer, gets such a prominent place, reminding us of the bachelor action the guys used to have.

This movie, technically well executed and sort of saucy, is perfectly good entertainment for kids, teen Ice Age fans, some parents and even those few wooly mammoths, saber tooth tigers or sloths who might be wandering through the multiplex -- yearning for the good old non-dino-days.

 
-by Michael Wilmington

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