Ice Age: Continental Drift

'Ice Age: Continental Drift', the fourth film in the Ice Age series, is lacklustre holiday fare redeemed only by a demented squirrel, writes Robbie Collin.

'Ice Age: Continental Drift', the fourth film in the Ice Age series, is lacklustre holiday fare redeemed only by a demented squirrel, writes Robbie Collin.

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e can be said about the Ice Age films, they are certainly cost-efficient. The first instalment in this animated series congealed in the spring of 2002, followed by further glaciations in 2006, 2009 and now 2012 — although with a voice cast made up of such odd bods as John Leguizamo and Denis Leary, it’s hard to shake the suspicion that 20th Century Fox barely expected the franchise to last one film, let alone four.

But with strong followings in South America and Europe, the series has accrued more lucre worldwide than Pixar’s Toy Story trilogy, and so here it is grinding back into motion for the holidays with a kind of tectonic inevitability.

Ice Age: Continental Drift, the thinnest in the set, has been on general release in Scotland and Northern Ireland for two weeks and has been playing previews in English and Welsh cinemas for the past two weekends, which means it has already grossed more than £7 million before its official release. Once again, the story revolves around Manny the mammoth (Ray Romano), Sid the sloth (Leguizamo) and Diego the smilodon (Leary), who are separated from their multi-species herd thanks to the shifting of the Earth’s land masses.

This is a novel premise, and more in step with the fossil record than Ice Age 3’s “lost valley of the dinosaurs” plot, which Sid remembers as “very unlikely but lots of fun” in some droll opening banter. However, it leads to nothing more than a very ordinary pirate story, as the animals’ floating land fragment is hijacked by a gang of buccaneers who live on a large iceberg shaped a bit like a galleon. They include Shira, a sabre-toothed cat voiced by Jennifer Lopez and grandly described in the film’s production notes as “an empowered woman”.