Movie Review: Ice Age 2, The Meltdown

What do you get when you end a movie with a Wooly Mammoth, a Sabertooth Tiger, and a Sloth deciding that they can be their own herd no matter how weird that is? You get a sequel that has a mandate to show us how many more odd combinations of herds there can be. Case in point: a female Mammoth who thinks she's a possum.

Now that's not to say Ice Age 2: The Meltdown is a bad movie, it's just that you loose something once the original three have decided that they are going to be a family. You miss the trust issues, the biting banter, and the fear that the tiger is just going to up and eat them. So now that they've set up this "any kind of a herd is OK" motif, they wind up stretching it out so much that the story never quite seemed very fresh to me.



Don't get me wrong, though. It was funny and entertaining. There were many times where I laughed out loud along with the rest of the audience and there wasn't anything in it that made me wish my kids weren't there. It's a good family film. The art and animation is superb in it as well.

In a nutshell the story goes like this: all of the animals live in an area of land that's surrounded by a glacier, which appears to be melting. After a warning by a buzzard, they all realize that they need to make it to this "boat" so they can survive once the ice wall breaks down. As the story's McGuffin, this premise seemed to work fairly well, but there were so many times the characters got sidetracked that it seemed like they either didn't believe the flood was coming, or didn't care.

There were two moments in the movie where I thought that they had actually run out of material and were just throwing in things to fill up their running time. One was a musical number and the other was a nighttime detour that Syd went on. They were cute, but had next to zero impact on the rest of the movie.



So would I recommend this movie? Well… maybe. I saw this with my wife and kids and we all enjoyed it. It was a fun day out which was more about spending the time with the kids and filling up on popcorn, pop and Skittles. Everyone had a good time and I thought it was money well spent. But I don't think I'd rush out to see it if it was just myself and my wife, or some friends. I think instead I'd wait for it to come out on video... or just watch the original.