The worst thing that a movie can suffer from its being forgotten about. Every movie tries its best (hopefully) to produce something meaningful, engaging, and memorable so that audiences can either continue watching years later, on at least have some positive or negative recollection of that specific. Even bad movies can sometimes have such a uniquely distinct element that it can draw people back in despite its quality. So, when a movie is forgettable, despite how mediocre the film may be, it can often be the killing blow to any film as not being remembered is arguably worst than being hated, because being hated invokes an emotion. Ice Age: The Meltdown invokes nothing but pure indifference. Returning to the ice age once again, the main trio; Manny, Sid and Diego (voiced again by Ray Romano, John Leguizamo and Denis Leary) discover that this ice age may not last much longer as they see the ice melting above them, which will result in the valley they live in all being flooded. With hope of a boat at the edge of the valley, every animal sets off to reach the boat while Manny discovers that he isn’t the last mammoth, meeting a female mammoth called Ellie (voiced by Queen Latifah) who is under the impression that she is in fact a possum. With Ellie and her two possum brothers; Crash and Eddie (voiced by Sean William Scott and Josh Peck) joining on their journey, the group race to get to the boat before they swept away in the flood, while prehistoric water creatures stalk them from behind. The first Ice Age was already nothing special in terms of an animated movie and it had its fair share of issues, but for a solitary movie, it was still trying to be about something. BlueSky Studios was clearly trying to turn it into a franchise, which is what it was never intended to be.

The first was a simple buddy road-trip movie; that was already a lazy trope when it came out and overall, it left the movie feeling cliched and juvenile in terms of its writing and characters. But to its credit, there were attempts at creating a real movie where it would try to earn emotion out of the audience. Even if they weren’t always successful, those elements proved that it was still trying. This has given that aspect up and is more content with being a goofy kids comedy with dumb jokes. It doesn’t attempt to give reasoning for its existence as a sequel as it doesn’t even feel like it really connects back to the first movie (outside of a few lines) and it never feels like its trying to put these characters in a position where things can develop. When a story element comes up, its addressed but not explored, which means the movie is pretending to care and merely feigning story just to make its existence meaningful. The threat of the ice melting and flooding everything unless they get to this one location is honestly a good narrative drive and one that could have a lot of tension, but it never feels as threatening as it definitely should be. Strangely enough though, despite how little this movie is trying to make itself a meaningful contribution, it’s hard to say that its painful by any means. Its drive to be as forgettable as possible also means that it barely has time to do anything outwardly mean-spirited or even anything that stupid. It just comes and goes with no rhyme or reason, so therefore, it leaves no impression impact. This is a positive at all, but it’s slightly better than having to sit through something painful.

Like mentioned previous, this story was not meant to be turned into a franchise. This shown through how obvious it is that these characters have nothing else to do, so there just kinda stuck in the movie trying desperately to have a point. The focus of Manny trying to connect with what could be the last mammoth besides himself is a fine idea and one that gives him a reason for existing. The side characters become entirely pointless after the first movie, only sticking around to sell more toys. The movie’s attempts at trying to give them purpose is to give them small little character arcs to go through that impact nothing with the story and further no knowledge about them as individuals, only existing so they have something to do. The main trio are still nothing special in terms of characters, Ellie could be a good character, but after the one joke about her being a possum gets old, there’s not much personality to her, the two possum brothers are pretty annoying and (again) offer nothing to the overall story. The voice acting from everybody is still decent enough since these are good names with talent, but when they’re given dialogue this bland and stupid, its hard for them to make anything good out of it. Any other character in the movie is just a throwaway, and outside of a pretty annoying Jay Leno appearance, none of them feel too distracting. Scrat’s involvement has become even more pointless; what once was the best part of the first movie, has quickly become stale and really only slows down time. Thankfully the movie doesn’t have a villain, instead relying on the flood and nature being the obstacle of the movie, but even the prehistoric creatures could have been much more threatening than they were portrayed to be (they started right, but went downhill pretty quickly). Even the vultures are a good idea, but they only exist just to sing ‘’Food, Glorious food’’ for no reason.

The only consistent element that comes with every single BlueSky Studio movie is the visuals. Despite their movies being pretty poor in quality, they’ve always had a keen visual sense that is colorful, expressive, and visually interesting to look at. If anything, the visuals were one of the only reasons this film was made; with the director, Carlos Saldanha, seeming more interesting in improving the character’s animation as opposed to what can be done with a story. While the first movie was nice looking too for the time, it has a slight mechanical element to the character designs that don’t look quite as polished. Here, they do look nice; the characters are expressive, colorful and have distinct attributes to tell them about. The environments still look a little plastic-like, but overall, the color is very nice and when the water starts to play more of a part in the movie, that stuff looks pretty good for the time. The sad thing is that this really can’t be too much of a compliant because its no different from any other BlueSky studio movie AND it doesn’t have anything visually creative about it to even make the visuals interesting. The writing is the typical BlueSky studio style of being pandering, dated and largely unfunny. It would usually work passable if the movie had any other redeeming element about it, but since their movies also usually have bad characters, predictable stories and hollow amounts of charm, its hard for it to survive when its this painfully bad.

Ice Age is a lot of things, in that it’s something that wasn’t perfect to beginning with, is something that probably got over-hyped and was shown too much because of its success at the box office, is something that could have used much stronger characters and writers to make it into something worth watching, and it was something that was largely just pretty visuals with an attempt at storytelling and a funny rat trying to bury an acorn. One of the things it definitely isn’t is a franchise, and this movie is exactly why it should never have been one. Despite the harshness, the movie isn’t even really painful to get through and might even be more competent and stable than the first as, despite still being a better movie, seemed a little more confused whereas this one drops any dramatic pretenses and feels more comfortable in its shallowness. It could be something that’s put on for kids in the background when their doing something else. It won’t make them dumber, but it won’t give them anything worth watching. Its just run of the mill bad and maybe in some cases that’s even worse than awful. When all you can see in your future is dinosaurs, ape pirate captains and meteorite-worshiping cults, maybe it’s time to let the franchise die.