Ice age: Continental drift

VOICES OF: Ray Romano,John Leguizamo,Denis Leary,Queen Latifah,Peter Dinklage,Jennifer Lopez,Keke Palmer,Wanda Sykes,Nicki Minaj

Rating: **1/2

Charles Darwin never encountered Manny,Sid or Diego,and would have perhaps torn his hair out at Scrat the squirrel’s survival abilities,given that he has been chasing the same acorn for decades. However,science and Ice Age,for all the series’s random referencing to earth’s evolutionary history,have never had much to do with each other. What this franchise was about though was animals now extinct,nature at its severest,and struggle for survival at its fun-nest.

Manny (Romano),Sid (Leguizamo) and Diego (Leary) take on the breaking up of the ‘Pangaea’ this time — the supercontinent from which land masses broke away to give us approximately the globe we have today.

As the earth splits up,Manny is separated from wife Ellie (Latifah) and rebellious teenage daughter Peaches. His quest,perched now on a flimsy iceberg that tackles storms to tornadoes,is to find his way back to them.

The fact is that Manny possibly couldn’t have a clue which way to head,in the confusing expanse of the seas and the constantly changing geography. However,what keeps the three and Sid’s long-lost cantankerous grandmother (Sykes) more worried is a pirate. Captain Gut (Dinklage) is a testy orangutan commanding a bigger iceberg,and the purpose of his unabashed villainy is no more than putting some fruits on his table — not a small feat considering there are no such trees around. For that,he keeps other animals enslaved to him — including an animal of inordinate descent but discernible accent called ‘Gupta’.

The clash between the two sides involves lots of snarls and snares,with animals crashing,falling,careening and colliding,only to bounce back,fur unruffled. Call it the 3D effect,for such crashing and falling recur several times in the film.

As the jeering orangutan takes centrestage,you miss nature and its quietly unassuming threat slowly building up in unseen ways. Here nature makes its presence felt only in the form of a giant stone wall that’s slipping forward,but it doesn’t seem to weigh too heavily on anyone.

A few songs and inane chatter propel this berg forward,as does a slinky sabre-toothed tiger (Lopez) who spars with Diego till they realise they better mate given they are the only two of their species seemingly around.

Much like its name,this franchise now seems frozen in time. Banking on the same mix of unusual animals juggled together,running away from chunks of falling things,with Scrat thrown in the middle. And extinction is not on anybody’s mind: an Ice Age 5 isn’t far away.

shalini.langer@expressindia.com