It’s time to thaw out the Cash Cow!

The Review

Quick: Tell me how many Land Before Time movies we are up to now. Seventeen? And I’ll bet you only remember the first one. That’s what happens when animals live past their shelf life. They just sit there, embarrassed and irrelevant. I’m nervous about the Ice Age herd for this very reason. The wooley mammoths and sabertooth in particular. They have shown a propensity to withstand anything: first the dangers of human hunters, then global thawing, and now dinosaurs. Encouraging? No. These animals need to follow their natural order. They need to go extinct. But just like their Land Before Time fore-runners, I fear they never will.

For the first fifteen minutes of Ice Age 3, Dennis Leary and I were bored. He plays Diego, the Sabertooth Tiger, and he was none too excited about the arrival of Ray Ramano & Queen Latifah’s child. Yes, the event would excite the Entertainment Tonight crowd, but it’s not enough to make a movie on. Perhaps Leary knows what we at HowAnnoyingIsIt.com have always known: that domestication is the enemy of adventure films.

Thankfully, Sid the sloth stumbles into a large, empty plot involving some unhatched eggs, an Australian weasel, and an underground jungle of evolutionally confused dinosaurs. Of course, he gets in trouble, and the herd must come to his rescue. Which they do. And along the way, the new wooley mammoth baby is born. Roll credits.

Ice Age 3 came to theaters in 3-D, but that did not enhance the experience. Rather, it only made the imperfections all the more glaring. The lack of originality was so well defined, it was nothing short of stunning! If you saw the first two films, you saw this one as well. Everything about it–the cranky tension between Leary and Romano, the cluelessness of Sid, the “don’t forget I’m a part of this movie, too” attitude from Latifa–is well known by now. And we’re going to see more of it, too. When Latifa delivers the final “Welcome to the ice age,” line to her baby, inevitability settled in on me. There will be another film. And another.

But there’s something else that was vaguely familiar. This is a movie about a character who finds mysterious eggs, gets captured, is sought out by a team of unlikely heroes including a pair of lovebirds and a capable Australian Piratey sort of fellow, only to be rescued on the back of a huge winged beast. I saw this movie before, ten years ago, when it was called “The Rescuers Down Under.”

At this rate, it’s probably safe for me to go ahead and announce the release of Ice Age 7, featuring the voices of slightly less expensive actors Brad Garrett and Wanda Sykes. Coming straight to Dreamworks DVD, summer of 2013.

The Kids

If they loved the squirrel and the nut before, they’ll love them this time. And the mammoths. And the sloth. Kids take glory in monotony. Personally, I get tired of whatever they ask when they say “do it again!”

The Verdict: Mostly Harmless

It’s mindless fun, and will only drive you insane when you consider that Dreamworks is making an absolute KILLING on rehashed, predictable material. Would that I were talented enough to perform the same skill ad nauseum, and win a mansion with each new audience.