This Friday, Tammy and I were invited to the movies by some new friends of ours in the “college and career” age group. (For those of you not familiar with Sunday School vocabulary, that means these folks are in the 19 to 24 age range.) It was a lot of fun to hang with college kids again and we only really felt “old” a couple of times. (Like when one of them said, “Oh, the Supertones were big when I was in, like, seventh grade.” Oof.)

All that is to explain why we went to an opening night movie. This is extremely rare for me. Unless it’s something I’m hyped about, I like to let the dust settle and see if the movie is worth my money. Still, “Ice Age: The Meltdown” was not going to be a total unknown to me. I really loved the first “Ice Age”, and own the DVD (that’s at least four grins, if anyone’s counting).

The first Ice Age managed to be funny even though it was pretty heavily laden with humanism and eco-nazism. The animation was revolutionary and the story was entertaining. The humor was just the right balance of silly kid stuff and clever word play. Brilliant. I was excited when I heard a sequel was on the way, but as per my usual pessimism with Hollywood, I kept my expectations under control.

“The Meltdown” was a lot of fun and I laughed out loud many times. The animation was improved over the original, but you have to be a CGI geek like me to really notice it. (The water and fur were much improved.) The humor was a little more forced in places and some of the running gags got old. There was just as much eco-nazi drivel hidden in the dialog this time (maybe more so with the global warming slant), but over all the movie didn’t come across as political.

If anything stopped this movie from being great, it was that the story was not well told. The plot was painfully stretched, with many seemingly pointless side trips and long rabbit trails that were only followed for the sake of a joke that didn’t really fit the story, even if it was funny.

The acting (voiced and animated) was excellent, the visuals were superb and the humor was enough, but in the end, Meltdown just didn’t live up to its older sibling’s standards. Still, I enjoyed it enough to give it three out of five grins.