The first Ice Age was everything you would expect from a CGI-animated kiddie flick, complete with celebrity voices, gratuitous slapstick and a measure of carefully concealed adult-oriented humor. The sequel to that film, Ice Age: The Meltdown, delivers the same thing, and while certainly not geared toward an adult audience, it probably won’t disappoint kids aged eight or younger.
All the familiar characters from the first Ice Age – Manny the mammoth (Ray Romano), Sid the sloth (John Leguizamo) and Diego the tiger (Denis Leary) – return in The Meltdown, and are joined by Ellie, Manny’s love interest who thinks she’s a possum (Queen Latifah), and her marsupial stepbrothers.
As the Ice Age begins to come to an end, the ice everywhere starts melting, and the valley is threatened by a massive flood. Romano and his cadre of B-list celebrity cohorts have to travel from one end of the valley to the other, where a boat lies waiting to rescue them. No real central villains are established, or at least none that talk, and many of the voices from the first Ice Age are missed (specifically Jack Black, Cedric the Entertainer and Diedrich Bader). Nevertheless, children tend to be easy to please, and ridiculous, CGI-animated anthropomorphic animals should be enough to distract the first grader in your family from whatever’s wrong with this movie.
For the adult viewer, hardly anything in Meltdown is worth the ticket, save for the interludes featuring a saber-toothed squirrel named Scrat (also from the first film and the star of Meltdown’s ad campaign) who desperately attempts to secure the elusive acorn. Besides this, and whatever amusement one might glean from trying to imagine any sort of coitus between Ray Romano and Queen Latifah, there is very little reason to bother with this one. Grade: D+ (for adults), C- (for kids).