Having spent the past 11 years seeing a ratio of four kids’ movies to each grown-up flick, I consider myself a bit of an expert in the genre. The rule of thumb is that the quality of the movie is in inverse proportion to the number of melted Maltesers in my hair and bubblegum-flavoured Slush Puppy in my shoe. Ice Age: The Meltdown is a movie that keeps the chocolates in their hot little hands and bums firmly in seats.
A sequel to 2002’s animated hit Ice Age, this movie uses the same formula and recycles some of the original characters. There is, for instance, the deliciously dogged (but voiceless) squirrel whose pursuit of a single acorn provides a sub-plot of superb physical comedy that weaves in and out of the action, reminding us that, even when the end of the world is nigh, someone out there will remain focused on the small stuff and the short-term goals.
The premise is that the Ice Age is over, the glaciers are melting and the cast — a woolly mammoth (voiced by Ray Romano) and a sabre-toothed tiger (Dennis Leary), plus an overgrown sloth (John Leguizamo) — must warn the other animals to quit their valley or risk drowning as the sea floods in.
My hopes that this was a political commentary of the dangers of climate change were dashed — in true Hollywood fashion, everything, even the destruction of the planet, can be resolved in an hour and a half, and with the application of the obligatory good ol’ family values message.
Manny the mammoth believes himself to be the last of his species, until he meets Ellie (voiced by Queen Latifah), typecast as a sassy sistah character. Ellie has been raised by a posse of possums and thinks she is one, with fairly predictable results. She and Manny find each other and a romantic sub-plot develops, which is used as a platform for some rather tired one-liners on the men-and-women-are-from-different-planets theme.
Far more amusing is Fast Eddie (voiced by Jay Leno), the ultimate shyster: he is selling end-of-the-world survival kits (a bent straw for snorkelling) and trading on the fears of the panic-stricken hordes of animals.
The sense of menace is magnified by the appearance of a pair of very sinister creatures, which appear to be part shark, part prehistoric crocodile, lurking under the surface of the ice and waiting for the great meltdown.
The three 11-year-olds I saw the film with particularly enjoyed the scene in which Sid the sloth is abducted by some normal-sized sloths. They immediately assume that his vast size means he is a reincarnation of the Fire God who must be appeased to avert the flood. There are echoes of the current hysteria of the American religious right here, which blames gay people and the teaching of evolution in schools for the United States’s defeats in Iraq.
Ice Age: The Meltdown is a fairly entertaining movie — the kids will love it. It’s a somewhat reheated leftover dish, but it was still amusing enough to keep the adults in the audience chortling throughout.