AMB Reviews

Ice Age: Dawn Of The Dinosaurs: 4.5/10 Stars

Release Date: July 1, 2009

Content Advisory: Rated PG for mild humor and peril. Several jokes around the bathroom. Mild peril includes humorous fights with dinosaurs, falls down volcanoes and many chases, as well as many comedic pratfalls and tumbles. Several mild sexual jokes that are sure to go straight over little kid's heads.

Review:

"Ice Age" has never been my favorite animated series, but I found the first two enjoyable and a pleasant escape for an hour and a half. In this third installment, however, I had quite different thoughts...

In Short:

"Ice Age: Dawn Of The Dinosaurs" takes place after the second installment. Ellie is pregnant, while Diego is thinking about leaving Manny and Sid. But when Sid stumbles upon several dinosaur eggs, this soon leads the comedic team into an all-new world where dinosaurs live. Dinosaurs that aren't exactly friendly towards these creatures. But when Sid is kidnapped by one of the large beasts, Manny, Ellie, Diego and newcomer, Buck must travel through danger and peril to reach Sid in time. This film features a returning star-studded cast, including Queen Latifah and Ray Romano, but even they can't save this film from its pointless plot that really ends up being simply annoying and tiresome.

In Full:

In this third installment of the highly popular "Ice Age" series, our friends Manny, Ellie, Sid, Diego and Scrat return in a supposed adventure including, you guessed it, dinosaurs. This time, after Sid finds three baby dinosaur eggs, he is later kidnapped by exactly that... a dinosaur... a creature thought to be extinct. Soon, Sid, Manny, Diego, Ellie, and newcomer, Buck are off an adventure to rescue her. By the way, did I mention that Ellie is pregnant and expecting a baby mammoth in the near future? That only leads to further complications. Meanwhile, Scrat is still after the darn acorn and this time, stumbles upon possible true love. Overall, though the plot sounds intruiging, it ended up being too much for me. The humor was dull and very loud. I wanted to take a nap while watching the film, as it was just so obnoxious and dull.

Fortunately, the stars voicing the cast were enough to keep me from falling asleep. Ray Romano voices Manny and does a teriffic job with what he was given. Having years of experience with comedy behind him (take "Everybody Loves Raymond," for example) he was the one character who did occasionally cause a laugh or two from me. Queen Latifah returns as Ellie, Manny's adoring wife, and she does it perfectly, with just the right touch of spunk, while at the same time portraying a very delicate character. John Leguizamo and Denis Leary also hop in the cast, and they add enough to it for me to successfully say that "Ice Age 3" has perfected its voice casting.

I was in a small town when I viewed this movie. The theater I went to barely had room for a concession stand, let alone enough supplies for a 3-D showing. I saw this in 2-D, and though some may say that's the reason it wasn't as good for me... I must disagree. The visuals and animation are still the same, no matter if they're popping out at your face or stuck to the screen. Dreamworks tries so hard to tromp Pixar, but they just can't. It's like Satan trying to overthrow God. He lost. Badly. I'm not saying that this is a horrible movie. But the animation was typical and average and not anything really worth commenting on.

The main problem I had with this film was its loudness. Now, I'm not talking about actualy physical, deafening loudness (there's Transformers 2 for that). More so, I'm rather saying that I could tell so hard that Dreamworks tried to make this hilarious. And some one-liners were quite funny. But when you serve up a plate of stale food, it all adds up to one big mess. Rather, this film tried to serve up a plate of rather hilarious jokes that were really old and stale, and with these types of jokes being tossed at me every other second, I wanted so badly to plug my ears and tune it all out. It was simply obnoxious.

"Ice Age 3" is more than likely going to entertain the little ones. In fact, I went with my family and two other small toddlers, and they all enjoyed it immensely. Maybe it was just me. The crude/mild sexual humor stretches its family-friendly limits an inch or so, but it is a mainly clean flick, if that's what you're looking for. Unfortunately, the movie itself was not too clean story-wise, and ended up being very messy and cluttered as well as loud and over the top. Things started to pick up towards the climax, but not even those last 20 minutes or so could save the film from the previous hour of stupidity and boredom we had to suffer through to reach that point.