REVIEW – Ice Age: Collision Course makes little impact

Make it stop. Please. Unless you’re a kid, in which case – you’ll probably enjoy it.

It feels like the thousandth entry in this franchise, but Ice Age: Collision Course is the fifth film since the first one came out in 2002. It features the voices of Ray Romano, John Leguizamo, Queen Latifah, Jennifer Lopez and Simon Pegg (to name a few) and, really, when it all comes down to it, chronicles the idiocy of Scrat, a sabre tooth squirrel who causes some giant problems for Earth. He’s so desperate for an acorn, he inadvertently causes a meteor shower, and puts the animals on the third rock from the sun in danger.

Where to even begin?

This film is so transparent when it comes to where the series is going: downhill – and fast. Writers are running out of ideas, the characters are as tired as the writers, and I think people are so over the series.

Well, except for the kids.

It’s all about the slapstick, the dumb, the cliche, lazily-written jokes. And while slapstick is okay (in reasonable doses – by that I mean here and there every once in a while – let’s call it ’embellishment’), it felt like I was listening to a poop joke (oh wait, there was at least one poop joke), or someone hitting/chasing/road runner-ing someone every five or ten minutes. It’s uninspiring, not uplifting, and I didn’t find it very funny at all. There are old story elements I’ve seen in the previous movies that are being reused in this film. It’s just so tiring for an older audience.

In turn, the kids will probably like it. It’s just another ‘episode’ of Ice Age as far as they’re concerned.

Nothing exciting from the characters, who are as cookie cutter as they were in the previous films, so if you don’t like change within the context of this movie, you’re okay there. You could blink and miss this film, and you’d be fine.

What also bothered me with this was you could easily piece together the events of the film by watching most of the trailers and clips on YouTube. Collision Course is a prime example of that, but, recently, so many other films have been guilty of doing this, too.

With that being said, you can decipher how the movie is going to go by watching the trailers and clips online, and skip the film. 1-and-a-half meteor showers out of five.

Here’s one of the trailers: