Nothing wrong but nothing new!

LET’S GET one thing clear: your kids will love Ice Age: Continental Drift. They will laugh and so will you. It will be a perfect weekend-y thing to do. The words that follow in no way attempt to take away from that fact.

But one also can’t ignore that the latest Ice Age is perfectly mediocre. How else can we explain the feeling of ‘fun while it lasted but can’t much remember it now’?

 To give Ice Age: Continental Drift credit, it is the fourth in the long-running    series. So the predictable storyline is a given. You know the much-loved trio of Manny the wooly mammoth (Ray Romano), Diego the saber-tooth tiger (Denis Leary) and Sid the sloth (John Leguizamo) are going to find themselves in trouble. You know the trouble will in some way be caused by Scrat the squirrel and his four-film old endless pursuit of that acorn. And you know by the end of it they will all enjoy a happily-ever-after and the acorn will still be drifting/flying/falling off somewhere.









The newer elements to the story are brought in the form of the troubled father-daughter relationship of Manny and Peaches (voiced by Keke Palmer) and her teenage angsts.
But in 1 hour and 28mins, there really is no time to delve into it, so its reduced to more of a 5-minute problem. And on some level, you know the storyline is too mediocre to delve into anymore anyway.

There are new characters of course, the most notable being Diego’s love interest Shira (voiced by Jennifer Lopez) mostly because she’s been voiced by Lopez. But you know what, even if it was not Lopez it would have been fine (given Shira’s miniscule role and Lopez’s high asking price). We preferred the hyraxes; yes they were mum but they were also cute in a very aww-inspiring, snuggly way. This is the first instalment not directed by Carlos Saldanha (he of all the previous three parts) and maybe that’s why this one’s not a classic. Or maybe all good things do have to end some day, so this needs to be the one with which we should bid farewell to the lovable antics of our Ice Age characters. It has been a decade you know

Note: View this review also on http://tehelka.com/story_main53.asp?filename=Fw280712Neither.asp