I have a son who loves the Ice Age series and Ice Age: Continental Drift was a movie he was very excited about. This is the fourth installment in the Ice Age series and it was released in 2012. The movie actually did really well at the box office pulling in nearly double what its predecessor would a few years later.
How to Stream or Download Ice Age: Continental Drift
You can stream it or you can download the full movie from iTunes. After watching it be sure to also check out the next installment in the series, which is Ice Age: Collision Course (read our review first).
The Movie Review
Ice Age 3 had really big stakes and the movie introduced dinosaurs into the mix. So, it was always going to be hard for this movie to increase the stakes. I think that they were quite smart by going for a more “family” focused story than trying to match the spectacle of what Ice Age 3 offered.
So, does it work? Well, it does the movie as the title suggests is about the continental drift that happened to Earth. This causes some of the gang to get split up and they are on a quest to find each other. That I know sounds very familiar to the past Ice Age movies, but this one has something that the others do not… Ice Age pirates!
These serve as the new villains for the movie. Peter Dinklage leads the Ice Pirates as this big prehistoric ape. He is joined by Jenifer Lopez who is his captain and a sabretooth tiger just like Diego and there is a subplot with the two of them falling in love. The Ice Age gang gets on the wrong side of these pirates so they are on the run from them as well as to each other.
One other character that I love in this movie is Granny. She is Sid’s granny and the two of them are hilarious. She is voiced by Wanda Sykes and she is a real highlight of the movie. Ray Romano, John Leguizamo, Queen Latifa, Sean William Scott and Josh Peck all return to the movie and are once again great.
There is actually quite a lot going on in Ice Age: Continental Drift. While you have the main plot there are other ones too. The daughter, Peaches is now a teenager and she is struggling to find her own identity as are her parents in knowing how to deal with her. It is pretty fun stuff to see a family of woolly mammoths have the same problems we all do.
Once again Scat is back with his own sub plot and I loved this! He finds an acorn with a map on it and it leads him to the lost city of Atlantis. Of course, as this is Scrat we are talking about his love for nuts gets him in trouble and things do not work out as he would have liked.
I have to be honest and say that while I liked Ice Age: Continental Drift. I do feel that it is not as fun as Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. My son also felt the same way, he liked it, but was not blown away by it. I think the idea of the Ice Pirates was really cool and the movie does look like a million bucks so it is worth a watch.
