At one point in “The Ice Age Adventures of
Buck Wild,” the twin heroes find themselves
in a familiar place and voice what many in
the audience are quietly thinking.
“Have we been here before?” asks the
slightly dim possum named Eddie. Replies
his equally dim brother, Crash: “It does kinda
look familiar.”
Yes, we’ve been here before. This is the sixth
“Ice Age” feature — not counting two TV
specials — and it’s all alarmingly familiar
even as it tries to refocus away from the
original stars: Sid the sloth, Mannie and
Ellie the mammoths, and Diego the saber-
toothed tiger, none of whom are voiced by
celebrities this time.
Screenplay writers Jim Hecht, Ray
DeLaurentis and Will Schifrin have reached
back to recruit many old friends for this
spin-off. Crash and Eddie first appeared
in “Ice Age: The Meltdown,” the one-eyed,
dinosaur-hunting weasel of the title has
been around for a few films now and the
whole thing is set in the same underground
world that was introduced in “Ice Age: Dawn
of the Dinosaurs.” Even Momma Dino makes
a cameo.
There are two welcome new characters:
Justina Machado voices a cool, striped
polecat named Zee and Utkarsh Ambudkar is
the bad guy, a big-brained dinosaur named
Orson. They add a critical freshness or else
the film would seem to last as long as a real
ice age.
The plot is a possum-coming-of-age tale.
Crash and Eddie (now voiced by Aaron Harris