"Simon Pegg does sterling work as the shell-shocked fuzz ball, bouncing off walls and twitching like a paranoid rodent pinball"
We've always had a fascination for dinosaurs. Perhaps it's because they're the closest thing we've ever had to dragons on the earth, and their sheer size and scale boggles the mind. It's almost impossible to conceive of a creature so big it could flatten your house and yet these things were frighteningly real. That's probably why they capture the public's imagination so readily and why dinosaurs crop up again and again in movies.
Hollywood is nothing if not afraid to take risks, which accounts for the constant conveyor-belt stream of sequels cluttering up our cinema screens. Dinosaurs are a sure fire way to stoke up the public's interest (just looking at the bewildering success of prehistoric turkeys Jurassic Park 2 and 3) Combine the two and you've got instant box office success without having to lift a gnarled finger.
Ice Age 3 therefore does just that, firing familiar characters from the previous films into a newly discovered subterranean pre-historic paradise. Woolly mammoths Manny and Ellie are expecting their first sprog and are busy preparing for their new arrival. Sabre-toothed tiger Diego decides he's had enough of playing happy families and slinks off to be on his own and Sid the Sloth has resorted to adopting a trio of T-Rex eggs to satisfy his escalating broodiness,
Sid's egg-napping soon attracts the attention of mother T-Rex. None too pleased with his well-intentioned surrogacy, she hauls him off to her lair faster than you can say "Land before Time rip off" and the gang are soon in hot pursuit, revealing a subterranean Cretaceous wonderland previously hidden beneath the ice.
It's at this point you start to wonder about the title. Ice Age. Ice Age. Its subtitle is "Dawn of the Dinosaurs", but the last ice age actually followed the massive extinction even which wiped out the dinosaurs in the first place. So it's not really "Dawn of the Dinosaurs", more "Here are some Giant Lizards We Forgot About".
Still, there's only so much white space you take and the new dino world is a welcome change of scenery. Palaeontologists everywhere will be grinding their teeth together is silent fury but it wouldn't be the first time Hollywood has played fast and loose with scientific facts. And anyway, this is a world where sabre-tooth tigers don't eat sloths and mammoths build mobiles out of icicles for their young so it's hardly an episode of Planet Earth.
Leading them through the perils of the new world is Buck, a one-eyed jittery weasel who's been living on his wits in Jurassic Park for several years. He holds a vendetta against Rudy, an albino behemoth which robbed him of one eye years previously. Simon Pegg does sterling work as the shell-shocked fuzz ball, bouncing off walls and twitching like a paranoid rodent pinball. His inevitable showdown with the saurian white whale leads to some excellent set pieces which make good use of the 3D effects and solid entertainment for kids and adults alike. It's not hard to see why he's fast making a name for himself in Hollywood.
Ice Age 3 hardly reinvents the wheel, treading a rather worn narrative furrow but it's entertaining family fun that proves neither sequels nor the drawing power of dinosaurs is extinct quite yet.
