Emerging from the cave
‘Croods’ entertaining, but hasn’t evolved much
It’s been seven years since the Dreamworks computer-animated entry “The Croods” — were you yearning for a sequel? Probably not. Well, “The Croods: A New Age” is here anyway, complete with original cast and completed by people working from home in the pandemic, and it is more of the same.
That is to say, “The Croods 2” is “The Flintstones” redux all over again. Set in a fictional prehistoric era in which cave people and evolved humans co-exist and the land is inhabited by fanciful creatures, the film once again focuses on the family of paternal caveman Grug (Academy Award winner Nicolas Cage), maternal cavewoman Ugga (Oscar nominee Catherine Keener), their teenage son Thunk (Clark Duke) and daughter Eep (Emma Stone, who earned a best actress Academy Award in the interim). Eep’s love interest is once again Guy (Ryan Reynolds), the evolved teen whose shoulders are less broad than his girlfriend’s and who is not at all liked by Grug. Also part of Grug’s “pack” is his and Ugg’s latest arrival, their feral infant Sandy (Randy Thom), and, at the other end of the Circle of Life spectrum, Gran (Cloris Leachman), Ugga’s nearly toothless and bald mother and former member of the Amazonian band “Thunder Sisters.” Gran wears a creature on her head called a “wigisus.”
Grug is as benevolent and unaware of his own strength and reliable common sense as ever. The family travels across the countryside astride the giant, multicolored Macawnivore they domesticated and sleeps in a protective ball of fragrant fur and unwashed limbs. Ugga still likes shouting out, “Kill circle,” whenever she feels the pack is in danger (most of the time), assembling all members with their rocks and sharp sticks. “If no one is dead before breakfast, it is a good day,” she notes, which is a bit grim, considering some of the hard-to-swallow nonsense going on in this film. This installment begins with the death of Guy’s parents when he was a child, and his many-mooned odyssey searching for “a place called Tomorrow” (Cue “Annie,” I guess?). Before you can say, “angry kangadillos,” the pack finds a giant wall and a multi-hued, seeming paradise on the other side where an evolved human family named “the Bettermans” (get it?), namely Phil (Peter Dinklage) Hope (Leslie Mann) and their daughter Dawn (Kelly Marie Tran), live in something too big to be called a tree house. It’s more like a tree McMansion. The only rule in this “Garden of Eden” is not to eat the bananas. The Grug pack prefers to walk through the reed walls of the complex than use its doors. Seated before a window, an enthralled Thunk becomes history’s first couch potato. What’s “privacy”? peeps Eep when she is told she will have her own room. The Bettermans clearly would like it if Guy becomes the boyfriend of their adolescent daughter and forgets Eep.
In addition to its roots in Hanna Barbera’s “The Flintstones” and such comic strips as “B.C.” “The Croods” also evokes such pop culture touchstones as “Tarzan” and “King Kong.” Things don’t always make a lot of sense (using tiny sloths as fashion accessories?), and scenes involving animal cruelty, however accidental and off-camera, are honestly not funny. Dinklage is amusing as metrosexual Phil, who has a secret, steam-equipped man cave. Eep doesn’t like the way Guy smells after a shower. A climate change plot angle is entirely gratuitous.
The voice talent is firstrate, and some of this new film is undeniably entertaining. But I feel you should be warned: Granny’s got abs.
(“The Croods” contains violence, rude humor and children in peril.)