The Valley Breeze

3/19/2010

AT THE MOVIES - If you're already an 'Ice Age' fan, you'll enjoy 'Dawn of the Dinosaurs'

** 1/2 "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs."

If you're a likable band with a fairly large following, best selling albums to your name, but not a lot of critical success, would you rather precede a beloved, highly lauded hipper band during a festival showcase, or would you prefer to take the stage closer to show's end?

A sticky predicament, as no-matter what performance order number you're assigned, you're still not going to be as sophisticated or even as relevant as your competition; even with a herd of supporters on your side, your music isn't going to inspire young musicians and admirers to pursue anything other than turning a volume knob up a notch in order to loudly sing along to one of your fetchingly trite tunes.

I'm not sure if 20th Century Fox intentionally waited until the puffy acclaim clouds around Pixar's "Up" cleared before releasing their bouncy third entry of their computer-animated "Ice Age" franchise, "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs."

Last year's rightfully fawned-upon Pixar flick "Wall-E" managed to reverse and roll right over any prior accolades given to Fox's' genuinely expressive "Horton Hears a Who!;" scooping up Oscars and accolades along the way. An intentional release date shuffle or not, "Dinosaurs" is that big likable band that will never provocatively strike, only stimulate, its target fanbase; existing for followers of the familiar, tired and true, like a Top Ten single you've heard dozens of times before, are generally sick of, but hum along anyway because someone else in the car likes it more than you.

Crafted for the franchise's biggest little fans, those whose ages can be counted on two hands or less, "Dinosaurs" is appealing in its slapstick allegiance to a prehistoric band of wobbly anthropomorphic beasts first introduced seven years ago in the first "Ice Age" entry.

This time, all of our lead creatures have their own darting sub-plots, more like a Saturday morning cartoon than a cohesive, singular feature film. Woolly mammoths Manny (Ray Romano) and his pachyderm partner Ellie (Queen Latifah) are expecting a giant bundle of joy, sparking jealousy in buck-toothed sloth Sid (John Leguizamo), this inspiring him to "adopt" a bundle of eggs that soon turn out to be a horde of bug-eyed baby Tyrannosaurus.

Stolen eggs breed bad karma and angry mamas, as the matriarch of the hoisted brood comes stomping forth to reclaim her kin. Lady T. Rex stands as the glue that binds the dinos to our motley crew, as our protagonists are thrust into an adventure mission to retrieve one of their own.

But wait, there's more! More characters; Diego the snarky sabre-tooth (Denis Leary), Scrat the jittery rodent, and a new lead, Buck (Simon Pegg), a one-eyed Brit weasel.

And more sub-plots; Diego also feels alienated from the pack, attempting to find his inner beast, and Scrat has a new love interest, yet is still interested in singular, futile acorn-hording. Throw in whooshing action sequences and plenty of suggestive humor and you have yourself a modern-day mediocre CGI kids' flick.

Though not as pallid as the franchise's second entry, "Dinosaurs" still putters along like a three-quel; sluggish and smiling, tap-dancing for the elementary masses. Not much of a message at hand here (quaintly summed up in one word: "families"), the only motivation bubbling is a yearn to keep the overlapping stories moving along at a pace that slows just long enough to allow for a quick bathroom break.

"Ice Age" was never a film that aimed for poignancy anyway, and kids who really enjoyed Sid's lisping yammerings, or Scrat's twitchy, death-defying jostling, will be on board and in store for much of the same in our current flick. It may not be award-worthy, but it's OK for the fans; just like a tired group of rockers who still manage to top the charts, even with a hit that will be out of our heads by next summer.

Someone out there likes them, so why not bring the old band back together for another go at it, eh?

- Now playing at CinemaWorld, Lincoln, 622 George Washington Highway, 401-333-8676, cinemaworldonline.com .