The Croods: A New Age (2020)

The Croods: A New Age arrives as a sequel nobody demanded, with the confidence of a film that knows its audience will show up regardless. The prehistoric clan scrambles over a wall into a manicured paradise owned by the Bettermans, a family of smug, technologically superior elites who condescend to their new neighbors while quietly scheming to separate Guy from Eep. The satire here is gentle but real: Phil's irrigation project has deprived the Punch Monkeys of their water, and the resulting debt of bananas drives the third act. That is a mild eat-the-rich undercurrent, served with a shrug. The conflict is framed around evolutionary class, not race, and the film has no interest in the latter.

Eep remains a headstrong lead, and the women of both clans eventually band together as the Thunder Sisters, a moment of female solidarity that lasts about as long as it takes to say the name. Kelly Marie Tran and Peter Dinklage fill out the voice cast, though neither role is written around identity. There is no queer presence anywhere in the film, no subtext, no glancing acknowledgment. The two families reconcile and learn to embrace their differences, and the lesson lands softly, wrapped in slapstick and a chandelier made from a giant skull. Nothing here lectures. The moral is delivered like a bedtime story, not a sermon.

Other absences are equally thorough. No environmental message clings to the irrigation subplot. No character wrestles with body image. Nobody is coded as neurodivergent. Prehistory is treated as pure fantasy, so no real history gets revised. What remains is a loud, colorful, competently assembled family picture that satirizes privilege without ever naming it and celebrates difference without risking offense. It is agreeable. It is harmless. It performed handsomely during a pandemic, which says more about that year than about the film.