SECOND SCREEN
Amazingly, it is now 14 years since the strange squirrel-like creature that we would come to know as Scrat made me cry with laughter with his futile, cataclysm-inducing attempts to bury his beloved acorn at the beginning of the first – and best – Ice Age film. As Ice
Age: Collision Course (G)H – the fifth film in the series – limped towards its halfway mark, it occurred to me that Scrat is the only thing still funny in a franchise now a good millennium or two past its sell-by date. Goodness, what an unfunny mess this has become.
This time around Scrat becomes the unwitting architect of our entire solar system. How Jupiter got its red spot, Saturn its rings and Mars lost its water… they’re all down to Scrat, who, having inadvertently tumbled into an alien flying saucer, zooms around the cosmos in pursuit of that acorn, causing galactic chaos as he goes.
The asteroid belt is his fault too, and so is the huge meteor now heading towards Earth, threatening the strange and decidedly unscientific mix of dinosaurs and mammals that has been the creative bedrock of the Ice
Age films. Yes, Manny (voiced by Ray Romano) and the rest of the mammoth gang, together with Sid the Sloth (John Leguizamo) and Diego the sabretooth tiger (Denis Leary), all face mass extinction, which is distinctly bad timing, as Manny’s beloved daughter, Peaches (Keke Palmer), is about to get married.
The story jumps all over the place, the screenplay is festooned with modern American colloquialisms and, just when you think it couldn’t get any worse, up pops Simon Pegg voicing the English-accented weasel Buck ensuring that the latest, and I hope, last Ice Age film goes down as a transatlantic disaster.