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There's a watered-down feel to 'Ice Age: The Meltdown'

By PHIL KLOER
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Ice is nice, but Scrat's all that.

Scrat is the name of the adorable little prehistoric squirrel-thingie in the 2002 movie "Ice Age," whose wordless, fruitless pursuit of a single acorn was that flick's funniest running gag. As relentlessly inventive and doomed to failure as Road Runner, Scrat is practically Chaplinesque in the purity and futility of his quest.

Twentieth Century Fox

'Ice Age: The Meltdown'

The verdict: Ice is nice, but this sequel feels a bit watered down from the original.

Director: Carlos Saldanha
Starring: Ray Romano, John Leguizamo, Denis Leary, Queen Latifah, Josh Peck, Jay Leno
Run time: 90 minutes
Release date: March 31, 2006
Rating: PG for some mild language and innuendo.
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Spirited voice-overs
Palm Beach Post "Flick Chick" Leslie Streeter remembers five animated characters whose voices make them adorable.

On the web
Official movie site
View the trailer
Trailers require Quicktime

Scrat's woeful adventures have been bumped up a bit for the sequel. When he goes kung fu on a school of piranha in defense of his nut — what, there's a problem with tropical piranha living in lakes of melted glacier water? — the audience goes, well, nuts.

The rest of "Ice Age: The Meltdown" is fine, in much the same way the first one was fine — not as inventive as Pixar, but not out scratching for jokes like "Chicken Little." It doesn't raise the franchise a notch, like the sequels to "Shrek" and "Toy Story" did, and even slips a little from the first one. But here's the math: Start of spring break plus pre-sold product that everyone likes plus massive advertising should equal biggest opening weekend so far this year.

Back in the non-Scrat story, our unlikely trio from the first "IA" are hangin' out, waiting for a new adventure to start: Manny the sad-sack mammoth (Ray Romano), Sid the annoying sloth (John Leguizamo) and Diego the saber-toothed tiger who's really a pussycat (Denis Leary). It turns out that global warming is melting the glaciers, and their valley is about to be underwater, so it's time to flee the flood. (The first commentator, on either side, who tries to connect this kiddie movie with the current real-life debate over global warming gets a Sno Cone jammed in the ear.)

There's less peril in "Meltdown" than in the first movie; it's more of an amiable road picture with a crisis thrown in at the end just because you need a crisis at the end to be resolved. Like life, it's all about the journey.

Joining the trio this time are Ellie (Queen Latifah), a mammoth who believes she is an opossum, and her two opossum "brothers," Crash and Eddie (Seann William Scott and Josh Peck), who are basically hyper, mischievous 11-year-old boys who give the kids in the audience someone to identify with. The adults, meanwhile, can pick up on the subtle courtship between Manny and Ellie, who may be the last of their species and thus headed toward some obligatory species-continuing. (That's Manny's notion, anyway. Ellie, of course, believes she is an opossum.) Listening to Manny and Ellie banter — Romano's nasal groaning playing off Latifah's light sass — is one of "Meltdown's" many small pleasures.

The propagation jokes will sail over kids' heads; nor will they pick up on the provenance of the clever musical number "Food, Glorious Food," which is, of course, a spoof of that show-stopper from the musical "Oliver!" In "Meltdown," it's sung by vultures circling the sky in Busby Berkeley-inspired patterns, and the food they're singing about is our heroes.

The first "IA" was generally about bigger issues, higher stakes. As one example, in the original Diego had to overcome his instinct to kill and eat the animals that were becoming his friends, while in "Meltdown" he only has to overcome his fear of water. It's a nice, family-friendly film, but I'm betting that a few years down the road, the DVD version does not get the continued spins that the first one still earns.