Welcome to movie math, where we review movies and see if they ADD UP to family fun!

ICE AGE 3-D: DAWN OF THE DINOSAURS – You know what I didn’t like about the series THE FLINTSTONES? It perpetuated the false idea that MAN and DINOSAURS co-existed. Remember Dino and Fred? Well, just when that generation of kids finally grew up and got things straight… 

Along comes ICE AGE 3-D: DAWN OF THE DINOSAURS. Yep, Manny, Sid, Diego and Ellie are back. And they’ve apparently run out of storylines. And what do you you do when you run out of storylines? You “jump the shark”. Oh, wait. That was Fonzie on HAPPY DAYS.

You add dinosaurs to the mix!  Yep, despite a little time gap of about, oh, 65 million years, between the Mesozoic Era and Ice Age, our wooly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers and sloths and other mammal-y friends encounter a lost world of dinosaurs. Guess that meteor wasn’t completely extinction level.

Where’s your suspension of disbelief, you ask? It’s an animated kids movie! I lost it in the same place where there the filmmakers lost their sense of story, humor, intelligence, etc. You know, if this movie had any of those things, I might have gone with the JULES VERNE aspect of this latest plot. But there was nothing to appease me. Not even SCRAT or the fact that the ever cool SIMON PEGG (Sean of the Dead and Star Trek) plays the voice of BUCK the…what the heck was that mammal anyway? The stylized animation in this movie makes it a little hard to tell.

Other things to throw into a film when you’ve run out of ideas: babies (Ellie is with child), road trips (to a subterranean tropical land pre fossil fuels) oh, and 3-D which, these studios are obviously hoping, will distract us from little story issues like…gaping plot holes and 2 dimensional characters.

Did Julia enjoy it? Sure. Like a 7 year-old will enjoy anything that allows her to wear 3-D glasses and watch animated characters run around, acting nutty all the while knowing she’s getting a Ben and Jerry’s right after. Was she resoundingly joyful when the final credits rolled? Eh, not so much. She LOVED the ice cream though!

Me? The 3-D wasn’t stunning enough to keep my mind from wandering (translation, I dozed a couple of times). And afterwards, I found myself really resenting the extra bucks I paid to have annoyance and mediocrity COME OUT AT ME from the screen. I like my annoyance and mediocrity in 2-D where I don’t feel I have to swat it away from my nose.

And yet, this movie is a hit. Just goes to show you how desperate we mommies are to come up with something, anything to keep our kids from bouncing off the walls during summer break.

BORED PARENT + MILDY ENTERTAINED KID = SAVE IT FOR DVD NIGHT AT HOME