Ice Age: Continental Drift Reviews
Top CriticYes, this is the part where I outsource my critical role to my children. If you are the kind of person who (quite understandably) abhors this particular gimmick, you may wish to stop reading now.
The best bits are basic and all but voiceless: those Scrat-intensive set pieces, still inspiredly squirrelly if much too far apart.
These films are generally good at being good enough, and the fourth installment, Ice Age: Continental Drift, doesn't deviate from that modest tradition.
In the end, this latest "Ice Age" movie is about as surprising and unpredictable as a glacier. And not much more fun.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Whenever I watch an "Ice Age" movie, I understand how my mother felt whenever I zoned out in front of the television after school.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Popping from one silly set piece to another is all that really concerns the screenwriters.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Logic may be extinct, but, boy, do these movies whiz by like ice cubes zipping across a linoleum floor.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The dialogue is sometimes too sluggish and definitely too preachy, the ending is a little too sappy, yet somehow this strange collection of prehistoric critters and their completely illogical life are consistently likable, if not quite lovable.
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| Original Score: 3/5
This fourth installment featuring the computer-animated, prehistoric critters is aimless and derivative. While the first Ice Age movie in 2002 was inventive and cute, there's far too little here that's fresh.
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| Original Score: 2/4
The plot ... just barrels forward with very few surprises.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Dinklage works hard, and his gold-toothed monkey mariner is amusingly designed, but it's not nearly enough to shake the sense that we're watching elaborate filler.
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| Original Score: 2/4
They keep pumping out more "Ice Age" movies, as if it were some sort of "Rocky" for kids or something, and if they never reach the heights of the best animated fare, they chug along efficiently.
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| Original Score: 3/5
How many times do they need to reassert the message that family comes first and friends are forever?
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| Original Score: 2/4
It all would have been more enjoyable without all the treacle and pandering.
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| Original Score: 2.5/5
The filmmakers stuff the film to a manic degree, albeit with increasingly textured animation.
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| Original Score: 2/4
The frenetic pace masks an emptiness; this Ice Age is just a collection of slapstick moments and fisticuffs, with pauses for Sid to regurgitate food into his paw and show it to everyone.
"Continental Drift," like its predecessors, is much too friendly to dislike, and its vision of interspecies multiculturalism is generous and appealing.
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| Original Score: 3/5
It's not very funny, but your kids might like it. For the record.
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| Original Score: 2/4
The characters are manic and idiotic, the dialogue is rat-a-tat chatter, the action is entirely at the service of the 3-D, and the movie depends on bright colors, lots of noise and a few songs in between the whiplash moments.
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| Original Score: 2/4
A mild bounce back from the dinosaur doldrums of the last Ice Age movie.
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| Original Score: B
The nothing-special Ice Age: Continental Drift is the library paste of movies -- smooth and flavorless, kids eagerly consume it despite its total lack of nutritional value.
Kids will enjoy themselves and adults won't feel the urge to spend the duration hiding out in the restrooms. Some of the jokes are funny.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
It's familiar, drawn-out shtick, and the humor lacks the subtlety of the first and best Ice Age, but there are some visually inventive high points.
