Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted was an unexpectedly charming addition to the summer’s kiddie flick franchise pile-up, better and stranger than, honestly, it needed to be in a subgenre that is, Pixar aside, usually just about merchandising potential and providing enough bright moving objects to occupy young attention spans for 80 minutes. People hoping for the same pleasant surprise when escorting offspring to Ice Age: Continental Drift might as well pre-crush those hopes in advance before donning their 3-D glasses — the film, the fourth in the series from Blue Sky Studios, is just a sugary jumble of goofy voices, hyperkinetic action scenes and rote plot elements that rolls forward just enough to get us to the de rigueur pop song that plays over the closing credits.
Ice Age: Continental Drift finds the series’ makeshift herd of glacial period animals still together and not eating each other (the carnivores in the group presumably have learned to eat only non-speaking extras). Mammoths Manny (Ray Romano) and Ellie (Queen Latifah) have a now teenage daughter named Peaches (Keke Palmer) whose best friend, molehog Louis (Josh Gad), is nursing an inconvenient cross-species crush on her. (She, unfortunately for him, has eyes only for fellow mammoth Ethan, voiced by rapper Drake). Saber-toothed tiger Diego (Denis Leary) remains grumpy, while sloth Sid (John Leguizamo) is still ignorantly blissful, even when the family that abandoned him stops by to leave his senile Granny (Wanda Sykes) in his company and then takes off immediately after.
The plot’s precipitated by the series mascot Scrat (Chris Wedge), an acorn-loving saber-toothed squirrel whose journey always frames and runs parallel to the main storyline, and who triggers the rapid breakup of the continents (a process that took millions and millions of years but here happens in maybe a day) by planting his prized…
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