ICE AGE: COLLISION COURSE (U)

Directors: Mike Thurmeier, Galen T. Chu

Voices: Ray Romano, John Leguizamo, Queen Latifah, Simon Pegg, Jennifer Lopez 

Running time: 94 minutes

Ah, children’s entertainment. A world in which bouncing creatures with springs for legs (The Magic Roundabout), skies that rain cheeseburgers (Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs) and rotund beings with TV screens for stomachs (Teletubbies) are all considered entirely acceptable. 

It’s in this deranged spirit that the fifth Ice Age movie embellishes its prehistoric animated canvas with an out-of-control flying saucer, a one-eyed weasel singing Rossini arias and a 400-year-old, rainbow-coloured, yoga-practising llama who is called Shangri-Llama. Adults may find that a bit much. Kids, I suspect, will lap it up.

It’s a rare case of the classic sequel formula — same again but bigger and louder — being rather effective. There’s a beefed-up prologue for Scrat, the squirrel-like creature whose fruitless (or should that be nut-less?) pursuit of a rolling acorn has set in motion the events of each of the Ice Age films. In the previous four instalments Scrat has inadvertently brought about an avalanche, the great thaw and the break-up of the Pangea supercontinent. What fresh ecological catastrophe is there left for him to instigate? Oh, just the potential extinction of the entire planet. 

Chasing his cursed acorn once again, Scrat manages to get locked inside a hidden spacecraft (what are the chances?) and becomes — just as Graham Chapman once did in Monty Python’s Life of Brian — an unwitting passenger on a cosmic adventure. 

During his eventful trip he manages to collide with several planets, sending them clanking into each other like pool balls, and accidentally creates the rings of Saturn and the red spot of Jupiter and puts the Moon into its orbit. More pertinently for the assorted critters of the Ice Age franchise, his actions send a 300-mile-wide meteor hurtling towards earth. 

Against this restrained backdrop, the domestic dramas of the main characters take place. Manny the mammoth (Ray Romano) must contend with a giddily over-familiar future son-in-law; Diego the sabretooth (Denis Leary) and partner question their suitability as parents; and Sid the sloth finds love. 

If none of that is quite as earth-shattering as the onrushing meteor, then Simon Pegg as Buck, the weasel, scampers in to save the day. His rejigging of Figaro’s Largo al factotum from The Barber of Seville while battling three flying dinosaurs is a thing of bonkers beauty (the animation, as ever, is vivid, slick and highly detailed). 

Does any of it make any sense? Of course not, especially the bit where our heroes visit a kind of prehistoric Center Parcs. Will the children who have watched the other Ice Age films in their millions care a jot? They will not. Take them along: this is silly, surreal summer-holiday escapism par excellence.