Movie reviews: 'The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild' shows the franchise is starting to age
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This week, TV pop culture critic Richard Crouse reviews new movies: 'The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild,' 'One Shot,' and 'Two Deaths of Henry Baker.'
For better and for worse, the “Ice Age” franchise seems to have been around longer than the actual Ice Age. With the latest entry, “The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild,” which is number six in the series and stars the voice of Simon Pegg on Disney+, the movies are starting to show their age. The characters and the voice work are still fun, but the animation doesn’t have the same pop as the earlier movies.
The action begins in Snow Valley, home of unruly possum brothers Crash (Vincent Tong) and Eddie (Aaron Harris). The possums are restless, bored with life in the sleepy, icy dale. They want to experience the world, away from the over-protective eyes of their make-shift family, woolly mammoths Ellie and Manny. “It’s time for us to move out and make our mark on the world.” By fluke, they wind up in the Lost World—“We came here to live a life of adventure”—a massive underground cave and land of danger that might be too extreme, even for them.
As Ellie and Manny fret—“If we don’t find them, I’m going to kill them,” says Manny—an unlikely “superhero” comes to Crash and Eddie’s rescue, a one-eyed weasel named Buck Wild (Pegg). Together they form a team to defeat the dinosaurs who live in the Lost World. “It’s time to get buck wild.”
“The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild” has a distinctly direct-to-streaming feel about it. The above the title voice cast from the other films—Ray Romano, John Leguizamo, Denis Leary and Queen Latifah—are gone, replaced with sound-alikes. Not that young kids will mind, or even notice. But older kids who grew up watching these movies—they’ve been around for 20 years—may feel this one isn’t a movie as much as it is an inexpensive, extended version of the TV series that was spun off the films.
