Diego (left, voiced by Denis Leary) and Shira (Jennifer Lopez) are in love in the fourth “Ice Age.”
“Ice Age: Continental Drift” does accurately convey a sense of prehistoric times. Carbon-dating techniques peg its inspiration to approximately 2006, when movies about pirates and Tyler Perry still seemed relatively new.
In the fourth installment of the comedy series that is mainly loved by countries that aren’t very funny (Denmark, Austria, Russia), Manny the mammoth (voiced by Ray Romano) frets about his teen daughter Peaches (Keke Palmer) as she tries to arrange a date with a boy mammoth (Drake). Just after wishing she didn’t have a dad, she doesn’t, as she and her mom, Ellie (Queen Latifah), watch Manny drift away/escape from them on an ice floe that breaks off and floats out to sea. Joining Manny on his ice raft are Diego (Denis Leary) the saber-toothed tiger, Sid (John Leguizamo) the neurotic sloth, and a new character, Sid’s ratty granny (Wanda Sykes). She’s dirty of mind as well as body (when she takes a swim in the ocean, an oil slick of her corporal juices forms around her). Sykes has a funny voice, but Granny is just a sassy-talking comedy cliché who would be right at home in a Madea movie.
Peaches and her crew get stuck in a dull subplot that amounts to her chatting with her friends and mildly offending one of them. Mildly more diverting is the main story, in which Manny and friends run into a gang of pirates commanding an iceberg like a ship. The leader is a homicidal giant ape voiced, in a bit of puckishness that will be lost on the kids, by subcompact-size actor Peter Dinklage.
Dinklage gives it his all, but his voice isn’t all that interesting (and that of Jennifer Lopez, as Diego’s love interest, is utterly bland). Also, the ape’s hair, which is supposed to resemble a pirate-y tricorn hat, looks more like a mortarboard, leaving an impression of a slightly weird math professor from Oxford instead of a dangerous maniac. His fellow scurvy buccaneers are given nothing to do except be background idiots.
The quality of the series is fairly con-sistent, and the last episode brought in $900 million worldwide. But the international nature of the property, for that is what it is, means a bias toward dull, simple slapstick (or, in the case of the squirrel Scrat, the ever-hopeful pursuer of acorns, scratstick). About the fourth time someone makes a false move and ends up sliding down an enormous icy slope as though on a roller coaster, I checked my watch and the movie was still only 20 minutes old. Fortunately, that meant only 60 minutes to go, not including credits. (Don’t be late, though: The best part of “Ice Age 4” happens before it begins, with a funny five-minute short featuring the Simpsons).
Though the movie also contains bright references to “The Odyssey” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” its habit of stopping the action for sight gags means that to an adult, or a native English speaker, it feels longer than it is. Popping from one silly set piece to another is all that really concerns the screenwriters. A chipmunk army appears for no reason except to amp up the cuteness, and Sid turns out to speak fluent chipmunk because this yields a silly scene of him dancing madly and speaking gibberish.
At best, the film serves up mild chuckles, with occasional cute jokes (Manny worries that his daughter is growing up too fast — “the next thing you know, she’s piercing her trunk”) and wordplay (the pirate captain, Gutt, is so named because he likes to slice open his enemies so that “your innards become your outards”). Scrat’s quest for an acorn-laden paradise (called “Scrat-lantis,” which to me sounds more like something you’d put on jock itch) provides a funny climactic moment.
Yet, though the cast includes some talented people — and also Joy Behar — too much of the dialogue they’re working with consists of slightly dated attempts to sound hip: “How sick was that?” “Yo, that was insane!” I do hope this is the last time anyone ever thinks he’s being clever because he sets up his two-word riposte by saying, “Two words.”