Some days in life really suck big time. On the same day your boss yells at you, your girlfriend walks off with your best friend, you forget your ATM card pin, you get a cockroach in your food from the restaurant and when you come home your roommate has forgotten to leave the key with the landlord and you cant get in. On such a day, all you can do is - either sit and rue your bad luck or walk out to the cinema close by, grab a popcorn and pepsi and watch ICE AGE II and ’chill’ out. That is what I did.
ICE AGE II starts [if you dont consider the gimmicks of the corn carrying scrat creature] from the point where the ’wierdest herd’ of Sid the Sloth[John Leguizamo], Manfred alias Manny the mammoth [Ray Romano] and Diego the Saber toothed tiger [Denis Leary] enjoy their peaceful life in a valley surrounded by ice cliffs. They tell stories to dinosaur kids and play in the water [except Diego who is scared stiff of water]. But soon they figure out that the ice cliffs are actually now reservoirs, as the ice on the other side of the walls has melted and the walls themselves may crumble any moment, flooding the valley. So the entire population stars migrating towards high grounds.
Manny is troubled as everyone he meets hints that he is the last of the mammoths. Then he runs into a she-mammoth Ellie [Queen Latifah] who grew up with two opposums and thinks that she herself is one. The story progresses with fiendish subterranean dinosaurs stalking the herd, Manny’s love for Ellie, Diego’s hydrophobia and the march to high grounds.
Unlike ICE AGE I, there is nothing much of a story, but I have long stopped going to the movies for the story. What’s special about the movie are the great music [especially the Fire King sequence], rib tickling comedy from Scrat, Ellie’s opossum brothers Eddie and Crash, and the script. Finally all I got to say is that just dont expect anything out of the movie, go in like a 10 year old, roar your head off, forget your boss or your girlfriend and come back like you have been hypnotized and not know what happened in the last one hour.
Some quotes-
Ellie: Manny, you can’t pick favorites with your kids!
Manfred: He’s not my kid. He’s not even my dog. If my dog had a kid, and that kid had a pet, that would be Sid.
Eddie: What if we’re the last animals left alive? We’ll have to repopulate the earth!
Crash: How are we supposed to do that? Everyone here is either a dude or our sister!