Review: Ice Age: Collision Course

Can you believe it’s been 14 years since the first Ice Age movie was released? Four sequels later, the franchise doesn’t look like it will be slowing down to a glacial pace any time soon. Heck, at this rate, it might even last longer than the actual Ice Age itself.

Since that first movie, the world has been threatened by The Meltdown (2006), seen the Dawn Of The Dinosaurs (2009), and been through a Continental Drift (2012). With Ice Age: Collision Course, there is now the threat of mass extinction, no thanks to the twitchy Scrat (Chris Wedge), whose shenanigans with a UFO (don’t ask) cause a giant asteroid to start hurtling towards Earth.

The original “herd” of Manny the mammoth (Ray Romano), Sid the sloth (John Leguizamo) and Diego the sabre-toothed tiger (Denis Leary) has also expanded to included an entire village of characters, including Manny’s wife Ellie (Queen Latifah) and daughter Peaches (Keke Palmer), Sid’s Granny (Wanda Sykes), Diego’s girlfriend Shira (Jennifer Lopez), possums Crash and Eddie (Seann William Scott and Josh Peck), and the latest addition, Peaches’ fiance Julian (Adam DeVine).

And that’s not counting Buck (Simon Pegg), the one-eyed weasel who makes a comeback here, having appeared in Dawn Of The Dinosaurs.

There are some new characters in this one as well – a yoga-loving llama (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), a pretty ground sloth called Brooke (Jessie J) who falls in love with Sid, and three Dromaesaurs (flying dinosaurs, apparently) voiced by Nick Offerman, Stephanie Beatriz and Max Greenfield, who have a slightly skewed sense of logic when it comes to surviving the end of the world.

Do you think they know were just making things up as we go along? Photos: 20th Century Fox

Do you think they know were just making things up as we go along? Photos: 20th Century Fox

Anyway, the gang has to figure out how to stop the meteorite from hitting Earth and killing everyone in the process. Yeah, that’s basically the story of this movie – a bunch of prehistoric animals have to try and stop their own extinction from happening. If this were a Disney movie (it’s not), these guys would probably have been the ancestors of the characters in Zootopia.

By now, you should know that there is very little point in trying to analyse the critical merits of the Ice Age movies. All you need to know is that it’s mostly mindless fun and entertainment for kids and families, and was only made because the one before it made a lot of money.

In that respect, Collision Course is pretty much par for the course. It doesn’t matter that the cast has grown so big that most of the characters don’t get much screen time at all.

It doesn’t matter that the script is pretty much copied and pasted from the previous movies (including some jokes). Heck, no one even cares that the whole story doesn’t make sense at all.

After all, the Ice Age series has never been very big on logic anyway. That’s not the point of these movies. The whole franchise has been built on one premise – Scrat (and his acorn) causes a world-ending event, and the herd has to find a way to cope with the fallout. It’s a tried and tested formula that allows the filmmakers to come up with as many silly and incredulous situations as possible without having to worry about things like logic, timelines, or historical accuracy.

Heck, the very first movie even had human beings, but since nothing has ever been mentioned about them in the subsequent films, it looks like they all died out.

Hooray! The Earth is saved from climate change! Oh wait, Scrat’s still around. Hey, that’s an idea for the next one – Ice Age: Climate Change, anyone? You heard it here first!

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