The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild (2022)

The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild arrives as the sixth entry in a franchise already running on fumes, a television series retrofitted into a feature and animated by a crew of roughly eighty people working from their homes. The seams show. Orson, a Protoceratops with a bulging brain, wants to rule the Lost World through strength, and Buck, a one-eyed weasel, wants everyone to get along. That is the whole of it. The film was not produced by Blue Sky Studios, and the absence registers in every frame.

Examining the cultural ledger, we find remarkably little to record. The voice cast includes Vincent Tong, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Justina Machado, and Dominique Jennings, a diverse ensemble by any measure, though these are animated possums and mammoths who never once discuss who they are. Zee, a striped polecat, fights capably, and Momma, a female Tyrannosaurus, arrives as muscle, which is standard Saturday-morning competence instead of a statement of any kind. The villain is mocked in his youth for his enormous brain, a detail that motivates conquest and nothing more. No character wrestles with identity, no economy is indicted, no climate is mourned, and no history is rewritten. The dinosaurs simply want the watering hole back.

The film's mild sermon concerns coexistence, the notion that a herd survives when everyone contributes. It is delivered through plot, gently, and it lands with the weight of a nap. Crash and Eddie learn independence, Ellie learns to let go, and the audience learns that a beloved franchise can be stretched until it is transparent. We are told the strong should not dominate the weak. Agreed. We are told little else. For a work of such modest ambition, the social consciousness on display is a rounding error, a faint hum beneath the slapstick and the peeing jokes. Classified accordingly, with a sigh, and filed under sequels that should have stayed in the icebox, which is the only taxonomy this one earns.

{"thematic_tags": ["sequel"]}