Ice Age: Collision Course (2016)

Let's be realistic.

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Completely and utterly stupid. This is definitely not for a mature audience. Its time to go back to the drawing board, or even better yet, kill the franchise. There really is nothing more to tell. Even my favorite Scrat was not funny.

Acorn-loving rodent Scrat inadvertently puts a comet on a collision course with Earth (don't ask!), following which our mismatched mammals have a world to save. And, all the while, dad Manny is having to deal with daughter Peaches' plans to go travelling with idiot boyfriend Julian. Assuming mammoths have boyfriends, of course.The fifth entry in the Ice Age saga once again finds a potentially earth-shattering disaster sharing centre stage with the soapy shenanigans of the main cast (as well as Peaches and Julian causing Manny heartache, Sid the Sloth actually has sufficient love-life for it to be causing him problems).The impending cometary collision is caused by Scrat pursuing acorns onto a flying saucer, frozen in ice, and then inadvertently piloting it into orbital disaster (fortunately, all the planetary bodies in the solar system are within about a hundred yards of each other, but it's a bit foolish of me to sarcastically make this point about a film featuring a cast of friendly talking mammoths, sloths, and sabre-tooth tigers). Scrat's stuff is, as always, comical knockabout humour and, for me, it was the best part of the film.The disaster plot fell a bit flat, as did Manny's concerns - these elements felt like little more than revisiting the difficulties in Continental Drift, and set me to wondering if these characters have now reached the end of their shelf life. They are pleasant enough company, but do they need to break new ground and, if so, how?Something else which seemed problematic to me was the CGI. The original character designs, of necessity, were blocky and relatively low on detail (CGI has moved on a lot in 14 years), and I've got used to CGI movies looking a great deal slicker than Ice Age 5 - which needs to share an aesthetic with its predecessors - does. Oh, it has moved on, but it has a tricky line to tread.The voice cast does fine, as always, and I suspect that this will sit happily in a 5-movie set but, to me, it felt as if this series has reached the end of the road.

Our same fun characters are out to save the world from a meteor. The film pays homage to "2001..." and Moses. The kids still love it. There were some decent jokes, but all-in-all the characters are starting to become more irritating than entertaining. Maybe we could end the Ice Age and kill them all off next time.

With every single minute of the first 30 minutes being one prat fall after another, this one showed me it was not going to be very good...To make it even worse, the CGI was way too bright, and just didn't project the same color as the originals...it felt fake, period...while it had 3D depth, otherwise it wasn't impressive...I'm having a tough time continuing on with this review, it isn't bad per se'...but in no way does it have the same magic we have grown to expect from Ice Age...