Escape the heatwave with 'Ice Age 3'

By Joyce Glasser - 02/07/2009

In Director Carlos Saldanha’s ICE AGE 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, most of the characters from Ice Age and Saldanha’s Ice Age: The Meltdown, reunite for a bit of time travel and new adventures.  Not only is this third instalment shot in 3D, but the group of friends find themselves trying to save hapless Sid the Sloth from a protective dinosaur whose babies Sid has adopted.

All this came about because Manny (Ray Romano) and Ellie (Queen Latifah),  the Mammoths, are now married and expecting a baby. Their old pals Diego the sabre toothed Tiger (Denis Leary) and Sid (John Leguizamo) are feeling left out with all this baby talk.  When Sid finds three abandoned eggs in a cave, he decides to become their mother, never imagining the real mother would return in the form of an angry – and extinct – T-Rex.   Since the babies have bonded with Sid, the T-Rex carries the four of them off to her tropical habitat millions of years in the past.

 

Sid’s friends’ decision to save him would have been a suicide mission but for the services of Buck the Weasel (Simon Pegg), the Jack Sparrow of Jurassic Park, who somehow made it from a previous Ice Age to the Jurassic age and has adapted.  Like Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, Buck is obsessed with killing the albino dinosaur, Rudy, who had blinded him in one eye years ago.

 

 

The mingling of prehistoric periods that are eons apart, works better here than the mixing of the Stone Age and Biblical Age in the comedy Year One, but it still raises a few questions. The first is why the film is subtitled, ‘Dawn’ of the Dinosaurs, when the friends have stumbled upon a mature species that they thought was extinct?   Moreover, even in a children’s cartoon, the script should have included some reference to the physical challenges the friends would have experienced in travelling from the frozen tundra to the tropics.

 

The script is surprisingly short on humour give the character of Buck is ‘made for’ it. The animation is CGI slick and although the 3D is under-utilised, it crops up occasionally to spectacular effect.  The dinosaurs are what the kids will love and these, it has to be said, are pretty scary (parental caution advised!). The friends are put through the ringer in several imaginative adventures but at 96 minutes, there’s room for repetition and longeurs to creep in – and they do. Although we now have a respectable Ice Age trilogy, the ending suggests there’s going to be an Ice Age 4. The filmmakers should resist the temptation.

 

 

That they will do so is doubtful. With Scrat momentarily finding love, Sid stealing someone else’s babies and Ellie giving birth to her own, procreation and continuing the species is definitely on the filmmakers’ minds.  It might be a coincidence, or a measure of how long it takes to make an animated feature,  but the list of human ‘production babies’ at the end of the credits is one of the longest I’ve ever seen.