Ice Age: Collision Course

Buck, a one-eyed weasel, is the hero of this film. He bucks the trend and stops a giant 300 mile wide asteroid from hitting the earth and wiping out the mammals, like one did the dinosaurs 165 million years ago. He figures out that the gravity of the earth is pulling the asteroid toward it, so he has to get some other kind of magnet to make it veer off its fatal course.

This smart weasel (voiced by Simon Pegg) takes all the ice age animals, including the wooly mammoths and the saber tooth tigers, along with him to the expected crash site to try and stop the giant space rock from striking the planet. More contemporary animals, like ground sloths and opossums accompany them in the long journey.

The trouble with this fifth edition of the Ice Age franchise is that it turns into an endless road movie with non-stop gags and bad puns. Frankly, the series had exhausted itself a few editions ago and is carrying on in auto-pilot mode. The characters and their eccentricities are all familiar to us and the jokes, based largely on word play, are no longer funny. The only entertaining moment is Buck speaking in cockney and doing a delightful operatic rendition that sounds suspiciously like Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

There is no plot between gags in this film and this makes it an exhausting watch.

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