Movie: Ice Age 2 The Meltdown
Krishna
First of all, yes, you have not missed the review of the original Ice Age here because we did not review it. This is the first Ice Age movie that we review.
Ice Age 2 follows the familiar plot line and the familiar antics of the Ice Age original. It still works. Remember Scrat, the weird sabre toothed squirrel? (You can consider that a stylized version of an ordinary squirrel but to me, it looks like properly prehistoric sabre toothed animal, in spite of the fact that there was no such squirrel that ever lived). He is there, chasing the single acorn throughout the movie. It is very cleverly juxtaposed with the theme of the movie.
In this movie, the crazy team of Manny the woolly mammoth is there, as well as the annoyingly mischievous Sid, the sloth, and also Diego, the sabre toothed tiger are all there. But they face the time when the ice age recedes and the world is flooded. So, the very first scene is where Scrat the squirrel tries to retrieve the acorn that he perennially chases and having secured it, tries to bury it on an ice wall (glacier?) and creates a hole in it, springing a leak through which water gushes. Clever. Similarly, when the ice wall (you think that the wall in the North in the Game of Throne series must have been something like that) splits apart, it is the squirrel that hangs for a while with one foreleg on each section! Nicely done.
There are more animals. The mammoth meets a lady mammoth but the trouble is that she thinks she is a possum and hangs out with her “brothers” Crash and Eddie.
There are scary prehistoric carnivorous and gigantic fish that come with the water as well, that creates more excitement.
Ray Romano is Manny again and Denis Leary is Diego again. We have the new lady mammoth, Ellie, is Queen Latifah. It is interesting that Jay Leno plays the con artist, Fast Tony, the Armadillo, who is more astonished than everyone when his con based on scare of the whole plain where they live would be flooded comes true too soon.
The antics are all there, there is the love interest in the form of Ellie and Manny’s “family” expands to accommodate them (Ellie and the two possums). There is also a lot of gags that do not go with the plot and set there just to entertain like Sid being carried into a giant colony of sloths who worship him as the Supreme King.
There is a goody goody lesson of Diego conquering his fear of water to save Sid and the other formulaic ending where Manny finds that what he was searching for all his life comes true – there is a herd of woolly mammoths that exist – and then gives up his lifelong dream of belonging to that herDiego conquering his fear of water to save Sid and the other formulaic ending where Manny finds that what he was searching for all his life comes true – there is a herd of woolly mammoths that exist – and then gives up his lifelong dream of belonging to that herd to stay with his “family”.
All in all, it is as good as the first one, but not novel anymore. It is now a franchise. Still entertaining, which is what it sets out to be. I think it can easily be given a 7/10
– – Krishna