Months – even years – after Disney (“”Toy Story””) and DreamWorks (“”Shrek””) refined the formula, 20th Century Fox finally dips its feet into the CGI pool and finds the water a bit chilly. “”Ice Age,”” the studio’s first effort, travels approximately 200,000 years into the past, as a mammoth (Ray Romano), sloth (John Leguizamo) and saber tooth tiger (Denis Leary) form an unlikely alliance to return an orphaned Eskimo child to its family.
Unfortunately, the setting these characters inhabit isn’t the only prehistoric element smothering this picture. Boxy animation reminiscent of the God-toting morality play “”Davey & Goliath”” feels decidedly retro, while the by-the-numbers screenplay fails to take one risk, trudging safely through pre-planned hoops towards a painfully vanilla finale that addresses family units you form when you’ve been discarded by your own herd.Moving at the breakneck pace of a two-ton glacier, the film’s flat jokes take forever to materialize. One perceptive child sitting behind me in the screening had ample time to tell his friend what was about to happen next (“”That nut’s gonna land on the squirrel’s head!””), yet the two still broke up at the inevitable punch line. Ah, to be young and desensitized again. Adults, however, will grow weary of the screechy, cartoonish, and unbearably sadistic “”Tom and Jerry”” slapstick humor, which only goes to show how far the filmmakers behind “”Ice Age”” have regressed. Trimmed to a scant 87 minutes, the film can’t complete two frames without cracking a character in the skull (Sid the Sloth, in particular) with a stray icicle or a tumbling rock. As far as I can recall, no one got kicked in the nuts. Color me surprised. ”Ice Age” needs a hit of Ritalin as much as it needs an original idea. One sequence, a wild ride down a frozen slide, generates a spark, but little heat. If you do manage to find a nugget of humor in this wasteland, cherish it, as the film’s agitated squirrel cherishes his prized acorn. In emaciated times such as these, you never know if and when we’re ever going to laugh again.Grade: DBy Sean O’ConnellMarch 15, 2002