Left cold

The animated wooly mammoth (Ray Romano), saber-toothed tiger (Denis Leary) and sloth (John Leguizamo) take yet another journey to the land of the suck in this fourth, and undoubtedly not last, installment of the popular kiddie adventures.

This time out, the animals must deal with the cracking of the continents, something that probably happened a billion or two years before they were born, but who’s counting? As with past adventures that involved dinosaurs, the makers of these movies just throw science out the window. Kids, don’t watch this film thinking you are going to get a head start on that big science test, because that would result in a big fat F.

When the planet cracks, the mammoth, tiger and sloth end up on a piece of ice that floats out into the ocean. They struggle to return so the mammoth can be with his lame family, but a pirate monkey (Peter Dinklage) gets in their way. So they must fight this pirate monkey, who inexplicably breaks out into a forgettable song during a very awkward musical number.

The part where the monkey sings would be this franchise’s most shameless attempt to ape Disney animation yet. When creatures sing in Disney animated movies, it’s magical. When they break out into song in Fox animation movies, it’s hackneyed. And I guarantee you will not be tapping your toe to the musical refrains of the stupid monkey pirate tune.

The movie also features Scrat (Chris Wedge), the crazy-eyed squirrel-type thing eternally chasing acorns. His sequences are shoehorned into the movie, and they’ve lost their charm over the years. Now he’s just an annoying, selfish little rodent that should quit the whole acorn thing and turn to something more bountiful and easy to catch, like scallops.

The writing for the movie is almost non-existent. The film uses the 3-D angle for time-killing adventure sequences in lieu of storytelling. There’s lots of sliding down mountains, riding waves, diving through oceans, etc. In short, there are a lot of excuses for characters not to talk.

The other major new character would be a white tiger voiced by Jennifer Lopez. Her character provides the possibility of a love interest for Leary’s tiger, but the movie doesn’t do much with that because it’s too busy going “whoosh” and “swish” with crazy action sequences that leave no time for tiger lovemaking.

And, oddly enough, the J-Lo tiger doesn’t get her own musical number. Strange that the Dinklage pirate monkey gets his own tune, yet the J-Lo tiger mostly just speaks drab dialogue. J-Lo does get a chance to sing in a song that plays during the credits, but Romano, Leary and Drake—who apparently voices something in this thing—sing just as much, so the J-Lo tiger never really gets to shine musically. Oddly enough, this little fact doesn’t really bother me at all.

In a summer that offers the likes of Brave, parents are better off just taking their kids to that movie twice than subjecting their prepubescent eyes to this thing. I actually got tired watching this due to all of the frantic 3-D movement. Or perhaps it was the stupid pirate monkey song that made me want to go sleepy time.

I fear these Ice Age movies are going to keep on coming. Future plotlines will probably involve more scientifically impossible adventures for these creatures, like their sailing to Mars on a leaf or battling evil pugs and bulldogs well before anybody even bothered to breed them.

That wouldn’t be any crazier or more impossible than the notion of a sloth dealing with the terrors of continental drift alongside a wooly mammoth whilst battling a dreaded pirate monkey voiced by the short dude from Game of Thrones.