Ice Age: Continental Drift
[youtube=http://youtu.be/ja-qjGeDBZQ]
In its own quiet, unassuming way, the Ice Age franchise has made it to a fourth installment. The studio has been churning them out for a decade (They save babies! They survive floods! They fight off dinosaurs!) and the latest edition – in 3-D of course – has your favorite characters Manny, Diego and Sid (voiced by Ray Romano, Denis Leary and John Leguizamo respectively) running into some seafaring pirates. Scrat the saber-toothed squirrel, as usual, is somehow to blame.
But is Ice Age: Continental Drift going to manage a tectonic shift in the opinion of the world’s film critics? The good news for 20th Century Fox is that the reviews are, relatively speaking, encouraging. “It’s familiar, drawn-out shtick, and the humor lacks the subtlety of the first and best Ice Age, but there are some visually inventive high points,” notes the The Hollywood Reporter. “The Ice Age format has endured surprisingly well: the fourth installment in this lavish animation series is once again a buddy movie with a spectacular prehistoric disaster back-drop,” raves Australia’s The Age. But Britain’s Film4 brings us all back to earth with a resounding bump: “Feels like a rudderless ship of ice floating in tropical waters.” No doubt we’ll all get to do it again a few years from now.