Blu-ray Review: Ice Age: Continental Drift

If there is one immediate, valid complaint regularly lodged against 3D movies it is that they are full of silly moments where things come out of the screen towards the audience for no particular reason other than the fact that they can.  It is a cheap trick and the sort of thing that angers more than one person, including yours truly (not all 3D films resort to this, but many do).

What is worse than the poor excuse for the effect is watching in 2D a 3D movie that uses such tactics on a regular basis.  When you add to that a bad plot and wooden acting, you're really not going to have a good time watching.  Ice Age:  Continental Drift, unfortunately, manages to hit the trifecta. 

This is the fourth outing for our Ice Age staples of Manny (Ray Romano), Diego (Denis Leary), Sid (John Leguizamo), and Scrat (Chris Wedge).  This adventure features an expanded cast which also includes the voices of Aziz Ansari, Joy Behar, Peter Dinklage, Nick Frost, Josh Gad, Queen Latifah, Jennifer Lopez, Nicki Minaj, Heather Morris, Kunal Nayyar, Keke Palmer, Josh Peck, Simon Pegg, Sean William Scott, Patrick Stewart, Wanda Sykes, and Alan Tudyk (to name a few).  If that feels like a lot of well-known actors to be appearing in a film, it is.  Certainly one could conceive of ways to utilize all the actors to their fullest and create a number of in-depth characters and several supporting parts which are interesting, if small. 

That doesn't occur here.  Characters, even our original ones, have no depth and one gets the sense that the actors have all been hired in order for the producers to put the actors' names in the credits.  Ice Age:  Continental Drift operates on the 'more is better' principle but instead only ends up offering more, none of which is better (even if I wasn't a fan of the second film). 

Apparently the cast of characters has grown through the years to the point where in this film the number of characters is now so large that they need to have wholly separate plots take place for them.  Between that and the fact that there is no depth to any character, the end result is that we get something more akin to a terribly long television episode and not a feature film.

Article Author: Josh Lasser

Josh Lasser, formerly known as "TV and Film Guy," and complete with a Masters Degree in Critical Studies in said areas, gives his opinions on TV, Film, and Entertainment in general. All of which he does in a shameless attempt to try to get paid to do the exact same thing. …

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