Hey folks. Capone in Chicago here.

I have very little love for the first two ICE AGE films. They seemed like dumbed-down, largely storyless endeavors aimed at making a lot of money because little kids are going to force their parents to take them to look at the pretty pictures. If you put a gun to my head and told me that I either had to tell you the plots of the first two ICE AGE movies or my brains would be on the wall, you might as well call the cleaning crew right now because I haven't got a single fucking memory of what happens in the first two installments. I know I like some of the actors who provide voices, including Denis Leary, John Leguizamo, and Seann William Scott, but beyond that I've found these films dull, forgettable, and hardly worth your money.

All of that said, the third ICE AGE offering (this one subtitled DAWN OF THE DINOSAURS and presented in spectacular 3-D) has its moments and is the best of the three so far by a longshot, probably because of the change of location. Rather than simply existing on an ice-covered world (or a world of melting ice, as in the second film), our heroes spend about five minutes on familiar ground before journeying down a hole in the ice that leads to a land where dinosaurs still exist, thrive, and have apparently mutated into pretty cool, more dangerous dinosaurs (that thankfully don't speak). Even the flowers and plants in this strange land are dangerous.

And with this new adventure, we get a new group of voice actors for the ice world and the dino world (just to clarify, the dinosaurs don't talk, but there are a few wacky mammals that live among the dinos that do), including Jane Lynch, Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, and the splendid Simon Pegg as Buck, a eyepatch-wearing, dinosaur-hunting weasel who has been driven certifiably insane from existing in a place where he could be eaten at any moment. In a funny way, some of the main characters (Ray Romano and Queen Latifah as wooly mammoths and Leary as Diego the saber-toothed tiger) are made secondary by the presence of so many more interesting things than them. Latifah's Ellie is pregnant and about ready to drop. Diego feels squeezed out by the forthcoming baby mammoth, so he decides to strike out on his own. When Sid (Leguizamo) goes missing, the group reunites to find him down in the lost world beneath the ice.

Maybe I liked the film because the threat of danger seemed slightly more palpable than the other films, or maybe I just liked having Hader, Wiig, and Pegg around to make this stale franchise seem a little fresher. I also like that the filmmakers didn't try to make the dinosaurs look entirely believable; they have the same exaggerated quality as the main characters. And the 3-D really does add to depth and much-needed dimension to the proceedings. Beyond that, there's not much so say. It's certainly doesn't come close to approaching the creative genius of UP, but it appears that co-directors Carlos Saldanha and Mike Thurmeier are at least trying to do something resembling original, and I'll acknowledge the effort.

As with the previous films, Leguizamo stands out among the regulars; there's something about his possibly retarded Sid that just makes me laugh. The scene where he tries to milk a male water buffalo: priceless. I'm in no way trying to imply that ICE AGE: DAWN OF THE DINOSAURS is a perfect film--far from it. I'm just saying that if you somehow accidentally find yourself sitting in a theater that is playing it, you might actually get a few laughs out of the experience. And the kids at my screening certainly seemed to dig it about 50 times more than they did the last Eddie Murphy movie. What I'm really trying to say is go see UP again, but if you can't find a theater still playing it and you absolutely need to see a 3-D CG-animated film, you could probably choke this one down without dying.

-- Capone
capone@aintitcoolmail.com