Some say the world will end in fire; some say in ice.
In the Screener's hometown stands the Cinemark IV, which for most of recorded memory has been the Cinemark II. Over the decades, a modest billboard in an adjoining pasture avowed "Cinemark IV Coming Soon!" with no sign of its arrival, until one day an impatient soul decided to halve each existing theater, thus indeed creating four screens, along with the distinct sensation that one is watching a large plasma television whilst seated in a bowling lane, and a rising dread of the Cinemark VIII.
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We say all this in the service of reminding you what life is like in a true small town (not an artsy state capitol), where there are no Soviet cinema retrospectives or Antarctic animal documentaries or movies in languages other than irreproachable Americanese. Unless you want to pay $4 for
Aquamarine
,
The Shaggy Dog
,
She's the Man
or
Ice Age: The Meltdown
, you're in for a two-hour drive.
Since it has already pulled down a cool $70 million, the GNP of a large banana republic or perhaps an LL Bean outlet, it's true that nothing will persuade you to stay home and make snow ice cream instead; but
The Meltdown
is disappointing. Its predecessor appealed partly in its pale-blue simplicity, a clever way to cut the CGI budget, but also a refreshing change from the usual geek-boy technique of cramming in the puns (thus inducing you to buy the DVD and play its director commentary repeatedly). Instead of a dozen verbal and visual gags per frame, there was a character-driven story: three prehistoric mammals occupying different rungs of the food chain who become unlikely friends as they unite to return a Neanderthal baby to his family. There was tension-"Will saber-toothed Diego (Denis Leary) try to eat irritatingly ditzy sloth Sid (John Leguizamo)?"-and empathy- "Will droopy-eyed Manfred (Ray Romano) recover from the loss of his mammoth family?" And perhaps most surprisingly, children were assumed (if erroneously) to have an attention span, so the editing wasn't frenetic; we were given time to ponder the movie's developing relationships.
There's literally no time in
The Meltdown
, which immediately turns disaster-movie as the
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trio discovers that behind a tremulous wall of melting ice, a
Deep Impact
quantity of water looms, threatening to submerge their valley. Everyone migrates south in search of a rumored boat (polite nod to Genesis readers) which they hope will save them from the deluge.
Manny's dysthymia over the imminent extinction of his species is interrupted by the appearance of a curvy woolly female (Queen Latifah) who thinks she's an opossum, thus effectively stalling their budding relationship; another subplot involves Diego's fear of water, and the storyline proper is again punctuated by the struggles of panting proto-squirrel Scrat, scrabbling after his ever-elusive acorn-by far the most amusing thing in the movie. Overall, its frantic action alternates with flat dialogue and only occasionally takes off into choreographed flights of frenzied glee (the vultures' ecstatic rendition of a chorus from
Oliver!
, for example, or an hysterical Busby Berkeley number with mini-sloths). If
The Meltdown
has any thoughts of being an environmentalist fable, it keeps them to itself; the moral, if there is one, seems to be multicultural: Stick with your adopted family of friends, even if they're weird-looking or annoying as hell, because your own genetic kind could go extinct, or your hometown could at any moment be overtaken by the climatological equivalent of the Tennessee Valley Authority.
