Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (**½)

Directed by: Carlos Saldanha
Starring (voices): Ray Romano, Queen Latifah, Denis Leary, John Leguizamo, Sean William Scott, Josh Peck, Simon Pegg
Seen: July 8th 2009

**½ Out of ****

Ice Age 3 is a fun third instalment to the established series from Fox Animation. It is entertaining and funny, almost unexpectedly so, and the animation is done very well. The same goes for the 3D and the different levels of animation, it’s very well done. But by now we should expect nothing less, surely?

Our strange ‘herd’ is once again pulled into the action as Sid is kidnapped by a T-Rex, and the team heads to the rescue. You see, below the ice there is another world, a completely different level that, if you look past the paleontological nightmare, something else makes even less sense, heat rises, while the ice age rages on, with a warm world right underneath it… Thought patterns aside, let’s get down to the movie.

Ellie (Latifah) and Manny (Romano) are expecting their first, Diego (Leary) is thinking of leaving the small herd to hit out on his own and become the ferocious hunter he was before, Sid (Leguizamo) wants to also have a family like Ellie and Manny, and Crash and Eddie (Scott and Peck), the two possums introduced in the second film as Ellie’s brothers, run along wherever the rest go (and occasionally freeze up). Sid ends up in the ‘underworld’ by looking at his reflection in the ice, which cracks it, making him fall through into a cave where he finds three rather large eggs, and immediately adopts them as his new children. They turn out to be T-Rex babies, with mommy coming along to claim her babies soon enough. She takes Sid with her, and the herd needs to save their friend, so they head downward.

Their arrival does not go too smoothly, and they are saved by the dashing pirate-like weasel Buck (Pegg). Buck has an eye-patch and a big knife, and he hunts dinosaurs, especially the big one, whom he calls Rudy. He is insane too, as we see when he talks on a piece of rock as though it is a cellular phone, among other things. But he is probably the coolest character in the film, as he becomes their guide to finding Sid, and in doing so is made the hero of the story.

So Ice Age 3 is very funny indeed, with very cool ideas and jokes, but the family/herd idea-recycling is starting to wear a bit thin. There was one specific moment where I distinctly thought that the makers must be young parents trying to transfer some of the feel of starting a family to the viewers. The dinosaurs in this film do not talk, and they all look like some sort of caricature. The Raptors are menacing and scary (but child-proof scary, not horror film scary), the Brontosaurs are ‘stupid cows’, and the rest of them range between background animation and small story-telling elements. While looking at the ‘T-Rex mother – three young ones – Sid’ dynamic, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Dragon and Donkey from Shrek, and I think you will be too, if you’ve seen Shrek. Buck reminds you, even if just slightly, of Captain Jack Sparrow – crazy as a loon, but effective in what he does.

So yeah, Ice Age 3 is fun, but it’s not great. It’s a rollercoaster ride through a few setups that act as plot points, and the best character in an Ice Age movie is, yet again, the one with no dialogue, and no particular involvement in the story (and the one on which the entire marketing strategy for the film is based): Scrat, who is joined this time by Scratte, a female Sabre-tooth Squirrel giving Scrat hell in acquiring his beloved acorn. I could watch a 90 minute movie about Scrat alone and be hugely entertained. So Ice Age 3 is cool, but only until the next Pixar film comes along.