Lots of Scrat, Little Humor
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I like Scrat. You like Scrat.
But no one, I suspect, likes the saber-toothed cartoon squirrel who made only brief appearances in both of the first two "Ice Age" films enough to want to watch a whole movie about him.
Nevertheless, there he is, popping up every few minutes in "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs," the third and barely-more-than-middling-funny installment in the series of animated features about the prehistoric adventures of Manny (voice of Ray Romano), Diego (Denis Leary) and Sid (John Leguizamo), a woolly mammoth, saber-toothed tiger and ground sloth stuck in a snow-bound world.
Scrat's annoying ubiquity is just one piece of evidence that "Dawn of the Dinosaurs" has been focus-grouped and is now bending over a little more than is healthy to please its audience. Others include jumping on the digital 3-D bandwagon and introducing not one, but three, adorable baby T. rexes.
Of course, there is a little vinegar to temper all that sugar. Simon Pegg makes a nice acerbic addition to the cast as Buck, a one-eyed weasel who carries a sharpened dino tooth for a dagger and acts as a guide when our heroes discover a tropical world of dinosaurs under all that ice.
What propels Manny and company underground is the pursuit of Sid, who has been abducted by the mamma T. rex after Sid attempts to raise the three offspring in a case of misplaced parental instinct.
Complicating matters is the arrival of Rudy. Resembling a giant albino crocodile, he's scary (my 9-year-old son insisted on holding my hand at one point), but he never really feels like anything more than a plot device.
That's really, in a nutshell, the whole problem with "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs." It looks like a real movie. And it has all the features people want: more Scrat, dino-babies, 3-D and themes of family and togetherness that were the hallmark of the first two films. And it's not utterly without charm. Only here, that charm feels less earned than manufactured, a product not of evolution -- or even intelligent design -- but of cynical, soulless opportunism.
-- Michael O'Sullivan
Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs PG, 87 minutes Contains cartoon violence and toilet humor. Area theaters.
