The Ice Age gang is back but when you have back-to-back animations with animals doing the talking (literally), either you must be too good or better than the last installment of your franchise to survive.

Sadly, Ice Age: Collision Course falters in comparison to other animated films this year including the very entertaining Zootopia, the brilliant Finding Dory and even Kung Fu Panda 3 as the same plot was used again here, with a few new characters but nothing extraordinary.

Yes, the film does bring laughs to the faces of kids but that’s what any animated flick with Scrat, Manny the Mammoth (Ray Romano), Sid the Sloth (John Leguizamo), Diego the Sabre Tooth Tiger (Denis Leary), Ellie the female Mammoth (Queen Latifah), Buck the Weasel (Simon Pegg), Shira the female Sabre Tooth Tiger (Jennifer Lopez) and Crash and Eddie, the two opossums, would do.

As a franchise, Ice Age’s fifth installment comes out as the weakest despite being in 3D. There are a lot of scenes that could have been shortened but were left as they were.

The arc between the youngsters — Peaches (Keke Palmer) and her fiancé Julian (Adam DeVine) could have been better; instead it serves as sort of comedy for the mature audience rather than the children.

Had the story not been about the end of the world that doesn’t happen (yes, it’s the same as before), people might have actually looked forward to it. But with Finding Dory in cinemas along with this world-ending animated movie, you know where your priorities are —searching for Dory, obviously.

The most refreshing part of the saga is the return of the one-eyed weasel Buck who entertained the audience with his swashbuckling ways in the third installment of the franchise, Dawn of the Dinosaurs. He keeps the old and the young busy with his silly acts that help the gang escape from imminent death and the planet from destruction (yet again!). He is also on the run from a pack of pterodactyls which gives their chase the dinosaur-and-weasel effect.

The scene where the asteroid hits the Earth is hilarious but that’s because it has nothing to do with overused plotlines; the makers of the franchise must come up with something new if they want to add more flicks to their name. Otherwise a short film titled Ice Age: Goodbye would do a lot of good to the fans of the franchise who are tired of dialogues that don’t mean much and action that they have seen enough of.

Published in Dawn, Young World, July 30th, 2016