Ice Age: Collision Course leaves good storytelling out in the cold

Ice Age: Collision Course, the fifth film in a franchise that this week topped $3 billion in total ticket sales worldwide, continues the loosely connected, chronological series of prehistoric tales. But the latest installment does little to justify the Ice Age films’ popularity: Scientific accuracy and theological orthodoxy die an early death in Collision Course, and its yawn-inducing script will almost certainly cause many viewers to wish the entire franchise into extinction.

The film opens with Scrat the fanged squirrel renewing his pursuit of the ever-elusive acorn. In doing so, his spaceship collides with planetary bodies, sending a large meteor hurtling toward Earth. With total terrestrial devastation just two days away, married woolly mammoths Manny (voiced by Ray Romano) and Ellie (Queen Latifah), daughter Peaches (Keke Palmer), her fiancé Julian (Adam Devine), saber-toothed tiger Diego (Denis Leary), and their mammalian chums devise a plan to divert the meteor. Hoping to have the planet to themselves, a trio of flying dinosaurs, believing they can soar above the catastrophic collision, attempt to thwart the mammals’ Earth-saving efforts.

The mammals also work through a more down-to-earth crisis: Manny and Ellie slowly come to grips with Peaches’ upcoming marriage to (and moving away with) the easygoing Julian, who struggles to prove his mettle to his future in-laws.

The film’s opening monologue asks if life on Earth is part of a “gloriously orchestrated plan,” a cosmic accident, or something “dumber.” The film’s answer, an absurd and random chain reaction of events set in motion by a space squirrel, seems more daffy than diabolical. But even if Earth’s origin remains a mystery to viewers, the screenplay’s genesis does not: Mind-numbing chitchat and a barrage of derrière-centric gags suggest the plot didn’t arise from a well-orchestrated plan.

Still, fantastic animation and a few clever bits save Collision Course (rated PG for mild, rude humor and some action/peril) from being the worst animated kids’ movie in recent memory. But neither does the film contain much to urge viewers to make their own collision course with the theater to see it.