The plot is every bit as tired as you'd expect from an Ice Age threequel, and the first 15 minutes are a real pain. I've only seen bits and pieces of the first two Ice Ages, but the writers clearly struggled to find any novel directions for the characters to go. What's worse, Ray Romano's woolly mammoth is absolutely unbearable. His character traits include overbearing, fails to be funny, asshole, and precious little else. But once a T-Rex sweeps one character into the land before time, some inventive settings and dinosaur set pieces save the film. Jaunting through a multitude of settings to save someone is hardly an inventive plot, but it's made breezy thanks to Simon Pegg's crazed one-eyed weasel Bucky. His Ahab-esque subplot may be familiar, but his witty lines and cracked out storytelling add a lot.

In fact, one could make a case that everything that wasn't in the previous Ice Age movies is pretty nifty, while all the old character seem tired. Maybe they should have gone with an entirely separate movie focused around Simon Pegg's character traveling back to the Cretaceous. It would have been a fucking stupid story, but no sillier than dinosaurs just happening to exist 40,000 years ago. You'd have to be a creationist to believe something like that.

So basically, this movie is going to make the motherload$$$ over the 4th weekend, right??

This movie is pretty good. The dinosaurs and the setting are nicely rendered.
The action scenes and 3D are very well done. Unfortunately, outside of Buck,
a lot of the jokes fall flat. I find Sid and Ray Romano's mammoth unbearable.
And why so little detail in Diego? It's like he doesn't have hair.

My showing in 3D only had 70-80 people at 4:55 on a cloudy, cool opening day.
I don't see it breaking past tracking with that kind of attendance. I would
guess somewhere in the 70-80M range for the 5-days, maybe less. Of course,
they could all be waiting for Friday and Sunday to see it.

The reviews for this are pretty bad.

Saw this in 2D..

dreadful

Scrat was pretty much the only reason I wanted to watch the first two, and it remains so here. Everything else feels tiresome.

Even Scrat is annoying this time. There's no memorable moment from any of the character except Buck.

And the jokes, all the good ones are already shown in a teaser trailer and a full trailer. You watch both, you miss nothing.

Sounds like its a good idea that they're moving the 4th film into the present day.

WHAT!????

The lead characters get frozen and end up in a modern day museum.

Its marginally better then the second one since the whole mammoth romance angle takes a back seat but it still feels as a battered and worn as an 1985 Ford Escort with busted rear shocks and squeaky fanbelt.

Outside of Scrat and Buck its utterly forgettable.

B+.
Ice Age 2 was a C+.
+ here is for Buck and B is because the setting and plot were better.
But yes I agree with some sentiments here.

Sid is horribly unfunny and I wanted him to get killed which obviously can't happen.
Manny is really such an asshole and incredibly unlikeable.
I've hated Queen Latifah's character throughout IA2 and she's not much better here. Thoroughly annoying.
Diego is borderline alright but suffers from poor voice acting.
Scrat is not at all humorous. I disliked that storyline in IA2 and here with that stupid feminine squirrel is even more tiresome.

The random mammals were funny as were their interactions.
The dinosaurs were damn awesome and the design and land was well done.
Buck obviously stole the show. The two possums were also quite alright.
In fact I rate this quite highly mainly for two things. The animation of the dino-land was really refreshing and interesting.
and second Buck has to be one of the better characters that animation has given us. Probably the best Blue Sky character to date to.

It's a watchable summer film, but it's the type you don't think of much one way or the other. Buck is good, I actually still like Sid along with Scrat, but I echo the meh for the Manny and Ellie character's, and Diego's storyline just seems undeveloped. They make his wooziness and age a point but don't go anywhere with it. I was expecting his old legs to catch up to him and to be killed protecting the baby in the last act.

It's the worst of the ICE AGE movies. It's not bad. It's cute and has some funny moments, but I'm not crazy about animated movies so I found it to drag, just like I do with most animated movies. It's kind of lazy IMO, but entertaining enough.

6/10 (B-)

the first third of this film is borderline dreadful. The plot set-up and the whole "we're drifting away" thing was incredibly cliched and extremely redundant. It felt incredibly rushed, re-introducing each character just for the sake of reminding us what we're watching, and consequently reminding us that they shouldn't have added any characters in the second film. It almost felt like they had gone through the first two films and filtered out everything good: witty humor, good slapstick, the edges of the characters, a good plot, awesome animation (for the time) and left all the bad: the shitty characters, the cheap predictable plot elemnts, the unfunny humor, and the simplistic boring parts of the dialogue.
They really turn it around with the new character (that can talk) who is better than all of the characters from the second film combined, and the adventure element. It is legitimately exciting, and while it is never near as funny as the first and rarely even as funny as the mostly humorless sequel, it is more exciting than the second by a long run, and sometimes more exciting than the first. Also the animation picks up, and there are some surprisingly good uses of the 3-D. (second best use I've see this year, to coraline, surpassing both MVA and UP).
Overall it turned out to be a pretty enjoyable experience despite the miserable Pre-dinosaur stuff.
3/5 (hovering on the edge of a 2, but I gave it the benefit of the doubt.)

It's the best of the Ice Age series but the series needs to do a bit more than the usual to make it more noticable and more appreciated when it comes to animated films for the whole year. Sid is the most enjoyable character in the film though Scrat is getting to be a bit tiresome. The story works well and doesn't seem to drag too much in its 94-minute runtime. Overall its a good effort from the team again but on the lower side of animated films this year. **1/2

Eh, I'd definitely say it's the worst. Animation-wise, it's amazing. All of the dinosaurs have such a cool, unique design to them. Scrat almost is unfunny in this surprisingly enough, even with a female squirrel in the mix. Simon Pegg was AWESOME as Buck though.

B-