Frozen stiff

The Ice Age movies are strong evidence that H.L. Mencken was right when he said nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. But Mencken was too provincial; the fact is, every one of the movies in this dreary series has made far more money overseas than it did at home—the last one, 2009’s Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs earned 77.2 percent of its $887 million somewhere else in the world. So let’s be fair: Americans aren’t the only ones whose intelligence can be profitably underestimated. You can make a lot more money doing it elsewhere.

The current installment, Ice Age: Continental Drift, expands on the 2010 cartoon short Scrat’s Continental Crack-Up, which circulated with Jack Black’s 2010 stinker Gulliver’s Travels. In that short, the dogged squirrel’s pursuit of (apparently) the only acorn in the universe causes the breakup of Earth’s prehistoric landmass into the various continents, and the short itself is incorporated here in its entirety. (Was Continental Crack-Up just an unacknowledged promo for Continental Drift? Probably; boundless creativity isn’t exactly a hallmark of the guys who make these movies.)

To some, Scrat’s single-minded pursuit of that acorn is as hilarious as Wile E. Coyote’s endless plotting against the Road Runner. At the very least, Scrat is the closest the Ice Age franchise ever gets to being funny, so when the movies cut away to him sniffing and squeaking around, it’s at least a relief from the dismal ordeal of the main story.

The main story this time around gives us Manny the mammoth (voice by Ray Romano) having teenager troubles with his daughter Peaches (Keke Palmer), while mom Ellie (Queen Latifah) plays referee. The continental split strands Ellie and Peaches on one side of the break, and Manny on the other with his pals Diego the saber-tooth cat (Denis Leary) and Sid the sloth (John Leguizamo). Also along this time, for reasons that wouldn’t be worth going into even if I could remember them, is Sid’s grandma (Wanda Sykes), who spends the movie making the kind of cantankerous wisecracks Sykes makes in all her movies.

Anyhow, as Manny and his party drift away on their island of ice, he shouts to Peaches and Ellie that no matter how long it takes, he’ll find them, and they should “head for the land bridge”—he even points with his trunk and the camera zooms in so we’ll know what he’s shouting about. How he plans to get to the land bridge himself from his little ice island, or how that’s going to help him find Peaches and Ellie, we’re never told. But hey, your intelligence is being underestimated here; it’ll go easier on you if you don’t ask questions.

The plot thickens when Manny and his crew run afoul of a band of pirates, sailing the bounding main on a ship-shaped ice floe. Heading this desperate crew is Captain Gutt (Peter Dinklage), some kind of ape (an orangutan, maybe, though he looks about as much like an orangutan as Sid looks like a sloth). His first mate is Shira (Jennifer Lopez), a saber-tooth cat like Diego—and we know where that’s going, right?

Why Gutt insists on menacing Manny and the gang is never quite clear, but menace them he does, even going so far as to get his hands on Ellie and Peaches—though how he finds them, or even knows who they are, is left as unclear as everything else. At least Peaches has come out of her teenybopper sulk; she’s learned that that mammoth clique she wanted to hang out with isn’t as cool as she thought, and she’s really, really sorry she yelled at Daddy last time she saw him.

Have I wasted enough of your time yet? Can we just cut to the bottom line? Ice Age: Continental Drift is worthless junk, just like the three worthless movies that came before it. It’s not as stupid as, say, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, but it’s the same kind of waste of time, offering nothing in return for the 95 minutes or so you’ll never get back.

And it’ll probably make the franchise another billion bucks. Maybe they should hand out “In my case, H.L. Mencken was right” signs with the 3-D glasses.