Review of Ice Age: Continental Drift (2012) by Max E — 26 Dec 2012

Heads must roll. Heads must roll for making me sit through that credits sequence.

Continental Drift started out quite well, clever in fact. Scrat fans shouldn't be too disappointed here, and a couple of his gags will certainly make the overall top 10, one of which explains the setting.

What we have here is a re-hash of the oh so original 'daughter's all grown up' story. Girl who wants to hang out with the dangerous and sleazy popular kids but is seen as a dork, and vulnerable to her father. Proves everyone wrong and becomes the *yawn* centre of attention.

Why bother, you might ask. Why put yourself through another Ice Age movie? The gags. I have to admit, this is at the very least funnier than the third one, whether that's saying something or not. It had me giggling and laughing right to the last shot, which is just about as much as you could hope for a film from this franchise.

The story core is seen before and simplistic, and the sub-plots predictable. Maybe I'm asking for too much when seeing a family adventure film, but surely, the kids who saw the first one must also be grown up by now. The granny character is perhaps the only one I cared about, the only one with some kind of backbone and consistent personality.

Graphically, no real change. Blue Sky haven't sacrificed the broad-stroke cartoony feel for any extra gimmicks, but they haven't created a varied palette either. Only at the very end do you see an alternative terrain to the one we've seen in almost every other episode (3rd one being the exception again).

John Powell's soundtrack went unnoticed here, which is surprising for one of my favourite screen composers. It wouldn't surprise me that he kept his best work for a more deserving project.

What really ruined this for me was the ending, as I mentioned above. It's bad enough having token celebrities do the voice-overs, usually made-up pop music stars who have no business behind a microphone of any kind. Having all of them do a little song for the credits was unbearable. It's so sickening having pop music infiltrate cinema just to sell a few more CDs, poisoning the airwaves in the process. It sounded awful, looked awful, and ruined it. I think even Minaj was involved at some stage, if that's any indication. Just for that experience I really docked the score for this one.

Objectively, it does its job, entertaining a few young kids and a possibly tipsy adult or two, but I hope for Blue Sky's sake that they move on to something new soon. Try harder.