Ice Age: Collision Course (2016) Review

How does Blue Sky Studios go from The Peanuts Movie to this?

I kind of have a soft spot for most of the Ice Age movies, but I don't think they're that great. Despite its nostalgic value, the first one was all-around decent, but charming. I didn't mind The Meltdown and Dawn of the Dinosaurs because they had their moments. By the time the series reached its fourth entry, Continental Drift, it started to overstay its welcome and reached a dip in quality. There was no charm or creativity, or laughs. They were made for the sake of cash, and lots of it.

If Continental Drift wasn't enough to show how tired the Ice Age series is getting, then Collision Course should be proof of that.

This time around, the series mascot, Scrat, accidentally activates a spaceship that launches into the cosmos. After failed attempts at slapstick, the ship hits an asteroid that is heading towards Earth, threatening all life as we know it. It's up to our heroes, Manny, Sid, and Diego, along with other characters, to find a way to stop that asteroid from hitting Earth.

Although the stakes are much higher, the movie stopped caring about telling a compelling story and instead decided to derail most of its characters, defy logic, and rely on bad jokes. Manny, who was once the lovable deadpan snarker, is now an overprotective father who wants to do away with his daughter, Peaches', fiance, who's just clumsy but lovable. It's stupid because he already went through a similar situation in Continental Drift, only that Peaches wanted to interact with her crush. It's horribly cliche that it took me out of the film.

Sid, who was once the bumbling but kind sloth, is now a straight-up idiot who cannot stop complaining about finding true love. Since Manny and Diego have mates, why not finally give him one? What do you know, a love interest by the name of Brooke awaits him. The problem with that is that she doesn't arrive until the third act, which makes their "romance" really forced and underdeveloped. Brooke is just there to be a love interest all while not having any character.

Diego... just tags along. He and his mate, Shira, have no point in being there other than the fact that Diego was in all four of the previous films. I'm starting to think that he really should have died at the end of the first movie. I know it sounds cruel to say, but he had the weakest and most useless character arcs in all the sequels. In The Meltdown, he developed a fear of water and overcame it; in Dawn of the Dinosaurs, he was debating on whether or not he should depart with his herd; and in Continental Drift, he becomes smitten with Shira. Here, he has no character arc. See what I mean? He's practically the load at this point.

Seeing Buck return, and once again voiced by Simon Pegg, would have been thrilling because he was actually the best thing to come out of Dawn of the Dinosaurs. I enjoyed his insane personality and we get a lot of that here. Unfortunately, he couldn't save the movie for me because he doesn't have a lot of material that works. This is what leads up to my biggest problem with the film: the comedy.

The comedy is not funny; not one bit. Collision Course takes on a denser and wackier tone more than ever before, and it fails miserably. A lot of the slapstick comes off as desperate to get a laugh out of the audience. Then we have the opossums Crash and Eddie being their usual stupid selves and come off as more annoying, especially with that "duty" joke that the advertisements love to play. For some weird reason, the movie also has a weird butt fetish. Every now and then we are treated to some butt jokes because children will think butts are funny. It is not!!

Oh, and the film uses the term "hashtag" in one moment for no reason at all. At least Ratchet & Clank had an excuse since there is such thing as social media in that world. This is supposed to be the prehistoric era and it pretends to have social media because... it's a huge thing in society now? Yup, it stopped caring.

The film also decides to do away with a lot of logic, making it hard to suspend my disbelief. Magnetic meteorites? Crystals that turn animals immortal? An actual plan to stop the asteroid? I know this is a cartoon, but you have to draw the line somewhere.

On a side note, the movie also implies that if you're an old geezer, you have no chance to find love. I'm serious, that is the impression I got. When the Geotopians started to age after Sid screws something up with their home, his grandmother actually rejects that one character who was smitten with her because he looks old. Not only is that hypocritical of her, but this has ageism written all over it.

I suppose it's easy to say that Collision Course dethrones Continental Drift as the worst entry in the Ice Age series hands down. I'd comment about how pleasant it looks and how decently-animated it is, but what's the point? Those cannot save the derailment and/or flanderizations of the main characters, cliched character subplots, things that do not make any sense, and flat-out unfunny comedy. Not even Simon Pegg could redeem this movie. How is that even possible?!

It thinks that just because it's an animated film, it decides to dumb things down for children by being obnoxious in order to get their attention. I'm sick of seeing animated movies like these because it makes the medium look bad. While I'm not asking for every animated family film to be smart or thought-provoking like Inside Out or Zootopia, I'm asking for them to not talk down on their audience.

In terms of animated movies this year, while I found Angry Birds more annoying, it at least had a couple of redeeming factors, but not by much. Ice Age: Collision Course doesn't really have any redeeming factors, save for its animation. I've dragged on a bit. It's high time that Blue Sky Studios puts this franchise to rest, for Ice Age: Collision Course is...

SOMETHING AWFUL

Also, why the heck did they drag Neil DeGrasse Tyson into this trash?