Film Review | Ice Age 4: Continental Drift (2012)

You'd be hard pressed to name a film franchise that has managed to maintain a respectable level of quality over four installments. Sadly, Ice Age 4: Continental Drift manages to provide a spectacular example of just why this is.

After Scrat (Chris Wedge) accidentally causes the break-up of the continents, Manny (Ray Romano), Sid (John Leguizamo) and Diego (Denis Leary) are separated from the rest of their herd and set adrift over the sea on a block of ice. With Manny determined to reunite with Ellie (Queen Latifah) and their daughter Peaches (Keke Palmer), the group cross paths with Captain Gutt (Peter Dinklage), a piratical primate with a rag-tag crew sailing on their own shipshape iceberg.

Ice Age 4 has its moments, albeit ones that are sadly few and far between. The opening sequence showing how Scrat, in typical Tex Avery style, wreaks havoc with the earth's crust through his usual nut-burying activity is a genuine highlight. It's a shame then that Scrat's antics throughout the rest of the film are severely downplayed from previous installments and, for the first time in an Ice Age film, feel desperately uninspired and woefully tacked on. Scrat's interludes have been a highlight throughout all of the first three films, so to have to write so negatively about them here is a real disappointment.

The film also makes some potentially good choices. I was genuinely heartened when Manny, Sid and Diego were separated off from all the other characters they've picked up across the first two sequels, a band of three for the first time since the original film. Disappointingly, the chemistry and sharp scripting of the first film is never recreated, with the trio feeling like a tired shadow of what they once were.

From there, Ice Age 4 is largely a collection of irritating and underdeveloped characters and recycled ideas from not only previous Ice Age films but also other franchises. Jennifer Lopez's Shira is a flat and uninteresting love interest for Diego, with Leary and Lopez having no chemistry. Dinklage as Captain Gutt is fine but forgettable; it's hardly worth mentioning any of Gutt's crew members, too many in number as they are and each as one-dimensional as the next. Sid's Granny (Wanda Sykes) adds nothing, feeling like an excuse to plough the well-worn furrow of jokes about old people. Worst of all, however, are the street-talking teenage mammoths, voiced by the likes of Drake and Nicki Minaj, that Manny's daughter wants to "hang" with. Any time these characters are on screen is excruciating to the point of embarrassment, and left me wondering how the Ice Age franchise could possibly have slipped so far from its charming origins.

Ice Age 4 ends up as nothing more than a signifier that the franchise has gone one too many and needs to end before it tarnishes the reputation of the far superior previous installments. It's a film strung together with lazy writing and vacuous pop culture references that feel desperate rather than cool. It's even a struggle to praise the animation which actually feels less impressive than that seen in the second sequel. Watching Ice Age 4 as a fan of the franchise in general only made its glaring errors and sloppy execution all the more disappointing. The best that can be hoped for is that the inevitable fifth installment (with Ice Age 4's box office success) is an improvement on this.

3/10

Film Review | American Pie: Reunion (2012)

The year that the original American Pie film was released was the year I turned fifteen, putting me somewhere close to front and centre of the target audience for what would become the first instalment of the franchise. Thirteen years later, and I have just turned twenty-eight, something which the makers of the series' fourth outing (not including the straight-to-DVD cash-ins that I have never gone anywhere near) are acutely aware. This is a film not aimed primarily at the teenagers of today, but at those who were teenagers at the turn of the millennium. American Pie: Reunion plays the nostalgia card throughout, which at times works very much in its favour, but at others is a reminder that a fair few of the high school antics of Jim (Jason Biggs), Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas), Oz (Chris Klein), Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas) and Stifler (Seann William Scott) are probably better left in 1999.

The film sees many a familiar face from the original film return to Great East Falls for a "Class Of '99" high school reunion. Whilst everyone is older and many things have changed, the main quintet use the reunion as a chance to try and rekindle some of the fun that they used to share in their high school days.

American Pie: Reunion lays its cards out pretty clearly from the word "go". The opening scene includes not one, but two wanking gags, as well as paying homage to a certain piece of clothing that played a key role in the opening moments of the first film. This is crude and low brow just as every previous offering has been, but it's also regularly quite funny.

Reunion also never tries to hide the fact that it's paying tribute to the series' origins. The original trilogy suffered from the law of diminishing returns, with the third outing - American Pie: The Wedding - feeling extremely lacklustre from the lazy attempts at humour to the fact that several key members of the cast were missing. Writing and directing duo Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg are well aware that one thing Reunion needs to do is rectify this, and on the whole they succeed. So we have all five of the male leads back, even if not all of them get to do much of interest. For American Pie fans, it'll just be good to see them all together. The film is also set - for the first time since the first film - almost entirely in Great East Falls, something which helps to cement the feeling of nostalgia and paying tribute to the franchise opener.

That's not to say that Reunion is an unqualified success. The plot threads that the film weaves vary in quality, from the mostly amusing antics of Jim and Michelle (Alyson Hannigan) attempting to rekindle the flame in their marriage after having a son, to the predictable and repetitive subplot regarding Kevin's crisis of conscience over realising he (shock horror) still holds a flame for Vicky (Tara Reid) even though he is now married. It doesn't help that both Vicky and Heather (Mena Suvari), the two key female characters from the series, get absolutely nothing of interest to do, making the whole thing feel somewhat imbalanced.

The inescapable fact that these characters are now meant to be in their thirties also makes some sequences of the film unpleasantly uncomfortable. An entire plot thread involving Kara (Ali Cobrin), Jim's next door neighbour whom he used to babysit and who is now celebrating her eighteenth birthday, regularly leaves a bad taste in your mouth and will make you squirm. It's at points like this that Reunion strays too far from gross-out comedy, becoming just grossly inappropriate.

There is still a lot to like here though, and the good outweighs the bad. The final act ramps up the nostalgia with cameos and references aplenty (disappointingly, Casey Affleck fails to make an appearance as Kevin's long-distance big brother), and provides several moments likely to bring a broad smile, if not a belly laugh, from Pie fanatics. It won't win any new fans to the franchise, but then Reunion patently was never made to do so. It's not as good as the first film, but it's a notable improvement on the third, and arguably surpasses the first sequel in some ways. American Pie: Reunion ends up a worthwhile and enjoyable, if flawed, addition to the American Pie canon.

6/10