Well, I thought we were on to a trend. We were going to watch Vampire in Brooklyn but then Rob had a terrible day at work and was down in the dumps so he wanted to watch something happy instead.I've never been too big of a fan of the Ice Age series. By that, I mean that it would never occur to me to put one of these movies on, even though I enjoyed watching the first two. Do you have movies like that? Where you watch because somebody else is watching or you're too lazy/tired to change the channel and even though you laugh at all the appropriate parts, when it's over you immediately forget that you saw it? And if somebody asks you about it later, you have to struggle to remember and end up saying "It was okay," in a vague sort of way. That's how I felt about the last two movies.
So it's a good thing that you could basically just pick this movie up and watch it without having seen the first two since this one is way better than it deserves to be.
Manny the Mammoth (Ray Romano) is a complete wreck because his mate Ellie (Queen Latifah) is expecting their first calf any day now. His single friend Diego the Saber Tooth (Denis Leary) feels out of place now that their lives have settled down and decides to strike out on his own. Sid the Sloth (John Leguizamo) goes the complete opposite direction and is so obsessed with Manny's family that Manny has to tell him to chill the fuck out. This saddens Sid (ha!) and he wanders off to find his own family. Being kind of retarded, Sid decides to take three eggs that he finds in an ice cavern and raise them as his own. They hatch into baby T-rexes and proceed to ruin the carefully created playground Manny had worked on for his kids. Then the mother T-rex shows up and takes her three babies back, accidentally grabbing Sid as well. Now Manny, Diego, Ellie, and her two possum brothers (Josh Peck and Sean William Scott) have to track the dinosaur through a Lost World-type jungle buried beneath the ice. Luckily for them and for us viewers, they run into Buck (Simon Pegg), a one-eyed weasel (not a euphemism) that may be completely insane but is nevertheless a great guide. Unfortunately, while they are tracking Sid, they are being tracked by a vicious predator named....Rudy.
Between Buck the batshit weasel and the amorous adventures of Scrat the proto-squirrel, this movie was hilarious. Comparatively, the main characters didn't really have so much to add. Denis Leary in particular was vastly underused since there's not a lot for his saber-tooth to do until almost the very end of the movie.
I do have one thing, I wouldn't even call it a criticism, more like a question. Like I said at the beginning, you don't have to see the previous two movies. However, if you had seen them, consider this: Ellie spends practically the entire movie telling Manny to lighten up since he's being super-protective about her pregnancy. But, in the first movie, doesn't he start out bitter and depressed because humans murdered/hunted his previous mate and calf? Isn't it also mentioned that he's afraid of being the last of his kind until he meets Ellie, who was raised by possums, in the second movie? I know it's just a kid's movie, but it seems a little fucked up to me that his mate is being utterly fucking callous regarding what is probably a deep-seated fear of abandonment and PTSD. Is there like a Wooly Rhino Therapist that Manny can talk to? Because otherwise, that dude is going to be a total wreck forever.
Also, and this just occurred to me, the fourth movie Continental Drift came out this weekend. I haven't seen it but the trailers indicate that basically Manny, Diego, and Sid get separaed from Ellie and the calf by shifting icebergs and have to go on a quest to find them again. Is it me or that not his worst fucking nightmare? The first third of that movie should be the tiger and the sloth taking shifts watching Manny so he doesn't kill himself.
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