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Our Rating
  3 stars

Duration: 96 mins

This third instalment in the Ice Age series of animated movies is the best yet. It is more accomplished than the first and less offensive than the second, while having plenty of fun, lots of action and just enough character development to give the film some heart, without boring the young and the restless.

Once again, the story is a simple quest. This time, Manny the Mammoth, Ellie his wife, Diego the sabre-toothed tiger, and two possums, Crash and Eddie, go off to rescue Sid the sloth, who has been captured by a dinosaur. (The writers get around the anachronism of dinosaurs co-existing with ice-age mammals by creating a subterranean 'lost world'.) Along the way, our heroes meet a new character, an eccentric weasel called Buck, who guides them on their perilous journey.

This film focuses less on the boring characters (Manny, Ellie, Diego) and more on the favourites - Sid and Scrat the sabre-toothed squirrel. In the running gag over the acorn, Scrat now has a rival - a female squirrel. The sequences are still funny, but they now have a battle-of-the-sexes subtext that loses some of the gag's innocent charm and could go over the heads of very young children.

Tonally, Ice Age 3 is a better family film than Ice Age 2. There is less aggressive slapstick and no fart jokes, although there is some crude humour involving ingested characters being coughed up or snorted out. In certain cinemas, the movie is in 3-D, which adds spectacular depth to some of the action sequences, but isn't gimmicky or over-used.

Language: Very mild: "butt", "barf", "preggers" and "shut up"; and a few minor insults: "idiot", "wuss" and "chicken-headed freaks".

Violence/distressing scenes: There is a lot of high-stakes jeopardy in which various characters are in life-or-death peril from falls, dinosaurs, lethal gas, carnivorous plants, falling rocks and lava. However, most of the action - even the drama - is either played for laughs, or undercut with humour. There are more threatening creatures than in previous Ice Age movies, including a T-Rex, a stegosaur, several raptors, pterodactyls, and a giant alligator-type creature. However, <<SPOILER ALERT>> no-one dies on-screen, and even a couple of apparently dead creatures turn out to be alive. (There are, however, several skeletons of long-dead animals.)

Sex/nudity: There is some mild innuendo: Buck says of a butterfly, "I knew that guy when he was a caterpillar - before he came out"; he refers to using a sharp clam shell to turn "a Tyrannosaurus Rex into a Tyrannosaurus Rachel"; on seeing a female baby mammoth, Sid says "It's a boy", but Diego points out "That's its tail!"; Sid mistakenly tries to milk a male yak (it's so hairy he can't see its anatomy); the female squirrel waves her tail alluringly at Scrat; she also rips the fur off his chest, exposing his nipples; later, they fall in love and dance together, cuddle and kiss.

Drugs/alcohol: The animals inadvertently inhale a gas that makes them speak with squeaky voices (like helium) and also makes them laugh (like nitrous oxide); it is pointed out this is a deadly gas.

Themes/values: The importance of family. As Diego says, pointing to Manny and his family, "The life of adventure is right here."

Target audience: Roughly ages 5 and up - although young and sensitive children might be scared by some of the dinosaurs or the jeopardy.

Trailer: