(The Disneycember logo is shown, before showing clips from Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs)
Doug (vo): Okay...now we have dinosaurs. (Chuckles) I don't know, where else is this series supposed to go? Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs is the third in this film's franchise, and...I will say this, they do get better with every one. I'm not gonna pretend that makes this a great movie, but it is probably the most cinematic. It looks the best, the storytelling and pacing is better, and it's easily the one I was the most invested in.
Story[]
Doug (vo): We open again on that possum weasel (Scrat) trying to get an acorn, but this time, he has competition. There's a special lady in his life now, and they literally share a love-hate relationship, seeing the acorn as something to bring them together or set them against each other. I remember this one vividly because when he takes the acorn and she starts crying over it, one guy in the theater shouted, "Don't do it!", and that always made me laugh. They're definitely a B-story, hell, it's not even really a story that ties into anything, you could cut it out and not miss anything. But they actually go with the main characters on the adventure, like, the whole thing is them falling in love and fighting over this acorn while the real story is going on, so you don't have to keep cutting back to a different location, constantly interrupting the story. If anything, you kind of look forward to how are they going to keep working their way into it. They still got the biggest laughs, but the main story itself got a few laughs, too.
(Clips focusing on the main characters' story are now shown)
Doug (vo): Sid the sloth discovers three dinosaur eggs, they hatch open, and they, of course, think he's their mother, and he's more than happy to oblige. When the real mother comes looking for them, though, she takes Sid, and it's up to Manny, Diego, and a pregnant Ellie to go and get him back. They discover there's a whole vast world of dinosaurs living under the ice, and a crazy hunter named Buck, voiced by Simon Pegg, shows them how to survive without going crazy, even though he himself has gone long crazy.
Review[]
Doug (vo): While not every joke from this character works, about half of them are pretty damn funny. I really laughed hard at a few of these, particularly when he gets a phone call from a rock. And every once in a while, he'll have a line that I swear Simon Pegg improvised on the spot.
Buck: Let me tell you about the time I used a sharpened clam shell to turn a T-Rex into a T-Rachel.
(Various clips continue to show, at one point showing several characters that Doug mentions)
Doug (vo): Everything about this film feels elevated. The story feels bigger, and everybody almost has shared screen time. There's a couple characters that, at first, I thought got a little bit of a shaft, like Diego and Ellie don't really have a ton to do in this one, that is, until the climax, where they cleverly put the two of them together so they can interact off each other. And then characters like Sid, who really took over the first third of the movie, are taken out of the picture for a while.
(Clips focusing on the film's animation are shown)
Doug (vo): I'm pretty sure this movie was shot in 3D, but I actually don't mean that as an insult to it. A lot of times, when the movie is purposefully shot in 3D, they'll do a lot of things to show off and it gets really gimmicky and distracting. But in this, because the visual style has never been that great for these movies, I think it really helps keep it more visually interesting. Everything's kind of in the center of the frame and in focus, and there's a lot of action sequences and a lot of moments where they want to make you feel like you're flying around, and, yeah, it actually turns out a pretty good time.
(Various clips are shown, primarily focusing on the family storylines)
Doug (vo): It's kind of funny having a story that's a little bit more centered on the domestic lifestyle like raising children and stuff like that, especially with Ray Romano as the lead, because, well, how can you not get flashbacks to Everybody Loves Raymond hearing this? But I will admit, I kept getting flashbacks to Black Books as well, as I kept wanting to hear Simon Pegg say, "The hell, Manny?" With all that said, though, I will say, I kinda thought this was all gonna build up to something a little bigger. That's not to say it didn't keep my interest and I didn't want to know where it was going, but this film was touching on stuff that, say, a Pixar film would touch upon, like I said, becoming a parent and changing lifestyles and stuff that a lot of people can relate to. But in a Pixar film, it usually has a really satisfactory conclusion, like, "Wow, that all tied together really nice". In this, it just kind of ends, and I feel like nothing that major is learned. You know, just the obvious stuff that you learned maybe 10 minutes into the movie.
(Clips focusing on the film's antagonist, Rudy, are shown)
Doug (vo): I remember they're really building up this dinosaur called Rudy, and Simon Pegg has this story about how he took him down, and they're building up what he looks like, and you see his shadow, and what's the payoff gonna be? Well, he's just a dinosaur. That's it. There's, like, nothing else to it. I thought maybe he was gonna be really tiny, or maybe he was gonna be, like, the father of the little baby dinosaurs, just something. But there's not that much of a payoff.
(Clips focusing on a running gag with a dead animal's shell are shown)
Doug (vo): But I don't know. The way these movies go, I guess I'm happy that I got such a good setup, a setup that has a bunch of funny little payoffs in the middle. Like, I really love this running joke where in the last one, this creature with a shell is eaten up and another creature finds the shell and tries to sell it as a product, and this poor corpse of an animal is being used all over the place. Sure enough, the movie opens with the shell still being used. I don't know why, that just makes me laugh so hard. There's a lot of little payoffs like that that I think makes up for the fact that there's not a lot of big payoffs.
Final thought[]
Doug (vo): So, yeah, while this is another Ice Age movie I'll admit I'm not gonna think much about after I see it, I will admit, it is the first one where I can say I legitimately had a good time. It had good energy, it had a lot of imagination, and I did care enough about the characters that I wanted to see what resolution they were gonna have. If you have kids and they like the other ones, I think they'll definitely like this one. And if you're an adult, I think I'd finally say, check this one out. It's got enough laughs to make it worth your while.
(One of the film's final scenes, showing the herd watching over their newest member, a baby mammoth named Peaches, is shown)