Review: "Ice Age: Continental Drift"

I was all prepared to dislike "Ice Age: Continental Drift." The series has not captivated me in its three previous iterations. Though the animation from Blue Sky Studios has been duly impressive, the characters and plots seemed decidedly downmarket -- crafted more for obvious appeal to kiddies than genuine amazement and storytelling craftsmenship.

Plus, these movies seem to come out every three or so years like clockwork, piling up reliable mountains of dough, not to mention inescapable toy and marketing tie-ins.

Heck, I'm not even truly sure if I saw the last one, 2009's "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs." Manny, the mammoth lead character voiced by Ray Romano, has somehow acquired a teenage daughter (Keke Palmer) that I have no memory of. Last I recall, he was still wooing wife-to-be Ellie (Queen Latifah).

Along with laconic sabre-tooth tiger Diego (Denis Leary, sounding bored like only Denis Leary can) and goofball sloth Sid (John Leguizamo), this cast of critters has certainly faced every prehistoric peril imaginable. First it was an ice age, then global warming, then the return of the dinosaurs.

I wonder if we'll ever see: "Ice Age: Natural Selection Bites," when the dwindling food supply can no longer feed Manny's bulk, and Diego decides he'd rather have a Sid snack than run with his adopted pack.

So, to sum up, my expectations were pretty low.

Therefore I was pleasantly surprised by a reasonably entertaining bit of family fun. The main characters are still cloying to me, but other aspects overcome the staleness. There's a spectacular action sequence to open things as the planet's land masses start pulling apart from each other -- due to the misadventures of the Scrat, the acorn-obsessed beastie who's sort of the mascot of the series.

All I can say is, the Scrat may seem pathetic but his survivability and outsized impact on planetary development actually make him the most powerful creature on Earth.

The new film also boasts a really terrific villain, Captain Gutt, a baboon pirate voiced with dastardly aplomb by Peter Dinklage. He even gets to sing a clever sea shanty with an assist from Jennifer Lopez, who plays Gutt's snow leopard first mate, Shira.

The pirates ride around on gigantic floating icebergs, stealing booty (food is pretty much the only valuable) and enslaving survivors of the continental catastrophe.

There are several other new additions who add some hot sauce to the mix. Wanda Sykes plays Sid's Granny, who's a combination of every old-person joke in the book, but she sells it and has several very funny moments. Aziz Ansari voices Squint, a hyperactive rabbit on the pirate crew, who yearns to move up the masthead. Nick Frost adds more comedic relief as a dim-witted elephant seal.

And Josh Gad plays Louis, a tiny molehog who's sweet on Peaches -- that's Manny and Ellie's daughter; the prospect of their coupling raises some urgent anatomical issues.

The story's about what you'd expect. Manny and his best pals get separated from the rest of their clan, and spend the rest of the movie trying to get back together. They run afoul of Captain Gutt, foil his plans, and he goes on one long revenge kick. Meanwhile, Manny's daughter has to learn to resist peer pressure and Be Herself.

"Ice Age: Continental Drift" held few surprises for me, but I have to admit that the execution by the filmmakers and voice cast is impressive. For lowbrow distractions for tykes, one could do worse.

2.5 stars out of four

Review: "The Dilemma"

"You're bouncing around. You do that a lot."

This line, delivered in the opening moments of "The Dilemma," is used to describe Vince Vaughn's character -- which is pretty much the same as every other Vince Vaughn character.

Vaughn's become a bankable star employing the same charming motormouth routine over and over. His signature move is to get rolling on a verbal treadmill from which he cannot easily climb off. We've seen it so many times ("Couples Retreat," "Wedding Crashers") that we've come to understand that what he says isn't important -- it's the feat itself, keeping the words coming faster and faster as he bounces around from one thought to the next.

The standout example of this in "The Dilemma" is when his character, Ronny, is giving a toast at his girlfriend Beth's (Jennifer Connelly) parents' 40th wedding anniversary. Ronny has recently learned that his best friend Nick's (Kevin James) wife Geneva (Winona Ryder) has been playing around on him.

He tries to use the toast to talk about the importance of honesty in marriage, as a way of shaming Geneva into confessing her affair to Nick so Ronny won't have to spill the beans himself. But he gets off on a tangent about temptation, imagining scenarios of Beth's mother dallying with the pool boy, and it's all downhill from there -- zigging and zagging all the way.

"The Dilemma" bounces around a lot, too. The movie can't quite decide what it wants to be when it grows up.

Ostensibly it's a comedy about Ronny's predicament -- whether to tell the man he loves like a brother about his wife's infidelity. The movie simply forgets to be funny for long stretches, as in one sequence where Ronny prays to God for guidance. "I know I'm supposed to give you things, but I'm scared to give you this," he tells the Almighty.

The biggest thing that's missing from the story (screenplay by Allan Loeb) is a sense of how important these relationships really are. Ronny's supposed to cherish his friendship with Nick so much that the prospect of telling him about Geneva tears him up inside. But we never see them doing much more than normal buddy-buddy stuff.

Ronny's relationship with Beth is off-kilter, too. He's a 40-year-old commitment-phobe, and can't bring himself to ask her to marry him. But what she gets out of this pairing is rather murky.

Geneva doesn't make a lick of sense, either. For awhile it's suggested she might actually be nutso, as demonstrated in a scene where Ronny confronts her and she cows him by threatening to claim he's made advances toward her.

Even Ronny and Nick's business partnership is goofy. Nick is supposed to be a brilliant engineer, but their dream is rather mundane: To make electric vehicles that look and sound like muscle cars. So basically they're just installing speakers under the hood to simulate the rumble of a gasoline engine.

(The movie has caused some controversy for a scene where they're pitching some General Motors executives, and Ronny calls electric cars "gay." I'll decline to enter the fray other than saying I think "South Park" already covered this topic sufficiently.)

Queen Latifah pops up as Susan, the liaison between the car company and our boys, who has a tendency to talk in inappropriate, hyper-sexualized terms. The joke is supposed to be that usually it's the guys in movies like this who speak that way. But she just comes across as another unexplained weird quirk of the movie.

The strangest thing about "The Dilemma" is that it was directed by Ron Howard, and has to be the most un-Ron-Howard-like film he's ever made.

The depressing part is not that it's not very good, or that a guy who's mostly done serious Oscar-bait movies has returned to his comedy roots. It's that this movie could have been directed by anyone.

1.5 stars out of four

Review: "Just Wright"

"Just Wright" is a love story that's a little bit old-fashioned, a little bit sweet and a little bit bitchy. It actually could have used more bitchiness.

It's sort of a modern take-off on "Cyrano" -- a less than conventionally attractive hero acts as matchmaker for his gorgeous friend to woo the ravishing lady of quality he himself secretly adores. Except the genders are switched around, and there's no feeding of poetry lines.

Queen Latifah plays Leslie Wright, a 35-year-old physical therapist who hasn't found the right guy. Laid back, a rabid sports fan (especially basketball) and self-confident, Leslie is the girl every guy wants to be best friends with -- just not fall in love with.

Her godsister Morgan (Paula Patton) is equally interested in basketball -- not for the game, but for the opportunity to land an NBA player as a husband. One senses that any player would do, so long as his bank account is fat. Morgan has no job and no interest in finding one: Marrying rich is her vocation.

One day after a New Jersey Nets game, Leslie bumps into Scott McNight (Common), the team's star point guard, at a gas station. He can't figure out where the fuel tank lid is on his new Maybach. After she hooks him up, he invites her to his birthday party. (Although I wondered how a gal driving a rusty old Mustang has any expertise about a brand of car that starts around $350,000.)

Morgan insists on tagging along to the party, of course, and the minute Scott lays eyes on her, he's in full pursuit mode. Leslie is clearly disappointed, thinking they had a spark between them, but is big enough of a woman to stay out of the way.

Then Scott blows out his knee, and it appears his season, and maybe his career, are over. Leslie is hired to help him with rehab and Morgan, sensing greener pastures elsewhere, dumps Scott via a note on his bedstand. She even returns her engagement ring, which I thought out of character.

It's not too crazy a guess that Leslie and Scott grow close during his grueling rehabilitation, and he starts to realize that having your best friend for a mate isn't such a bad idea after all.

After Scott is back tearing up the basketball court, Morgan makes an 11th-hour return to claim her man again. I'll leave the outcome to those who buy a ticket. One wonders, though, what Morgan was doing during the intervening months. Certainly not working, so what did she do for money? Was she giving try-outs to other NBA ballers for her one-woman team?

Director Sanaa Hamri and screenwriter Michael Elliot deliver a reasonably entertaining romance, and I certainly enjoyed all the cameos but real NBA players like Dwayne Wade and Dwight Howard. Common, a rapper by trade, looks fairly comfortable in the basketball scenes -- although the moments when he dunks are carefully framed so as not to show where his feet are.

Queen Latifah has a wonderful onscreen presence -- audiences instinctively like her and root for her. Common, however, just doesn't have the acting chops for a romantic comedy. He smiles a lot -- I mean a lot, almost Joker-like -- but the emotion never seems to reach his eyes. His line readings are stiff and clunky. Perhaps he's got a future in the movies, but right now I'm not seeing it.

I wish "Just Wright" could have been more a meditation on attraction versus substance. There are a lot of terrific women out there who are not considered beautiful by society's standards, and spend their days alone when they could make someone very happy. (Vice-versa the other way.) I would have loved to see some scene where Scott has started to act upon his feelings for Leslie, and some of his buddies rag on him for dating someone who's not model-gorgeous.

I suppose it's too much to ask for contemplation of substance-vs.-looks in a movie that just wants to entertain.

By the way, you know "Just Wright" is a work of fiction because it depicts the New Jersey Nets making it to the NBA Finals to compete for a championship. The real-life team flirted with the worst record in league history this past season, and was just sold to a Russian oligarch.

2.5 stars out of four