Film Reviews

GO ICE AGE: THE MELTDOWN Never a dull moment for prehistory’s most long-faced woolly mammoth, Manny (Ray Romano), and his square-peg pals Sid the Sloth (John Leguizamo) and Diego the Tiger (Denis Leary): One millennium, they’re getting frozen into extinction; the next, hot-button issues loom as the globe warms to unacceptable levels and a bursting dam threatens to drown the cute residents of their happy little valley. It’s the fate of most sequels to puff and pant with the effort to top what went before, but if Ice Age: The Meltdown is a little too frantic with slapstick for its own good — director Carlos Saldanha has expanded the squirrel-rat’s acorn-seeking shtick to the point of tedium, unless you happen to be 2 years old — the movie still retains the goofy charm, stylish visuals and attention to character of its fine 2002 predecessor. Queen Latifah is a warm and plummy new presence as a voluptuous lady mammoth whose only drawback is that she was raised by possums and thinks she’s one herself. And among several set-piece treats, a Busby Berkeley–style musical number sung by proliferating minisloths stands out for sheer sublime silliness. But what’s up with the vogue for upping the scare-factor ante in current movies for tots? There are scenes here that will play like a horror movie to the under-5 crowd. (Citywide) (Ella Taylor)

LARRY THE CABLE GUY: HEALTH INSPECTOR In the vernacular of the Bush era, Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector can be thought of as unabashedly “playing to its base.” Sort of a cracker variation on the Tyler Perry films, it’ll give fans exactly what they expect while passing unseen by anyone else. Nothing sums up the movie quite so well as knowing that within the first minute and a half there is a view of Larry’s butt crack — and a guy gets racked in the nuts. The logical knot of how a character known as Larry the Cable Guy comes to work as a restaurant health inspector is perhaps best left to bigger minds, though it does guarantee ample fart jokes and the obligatory “Larry on the toilet” scene. Curiously, the script is credited to Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer, two former Spin writers, but there’s no sense of meta-sophistication here, and the low road always wins out. Great pains are made to show Larry being friendly to the proprietors of a sushi house, an Indian joint and a soul-food place, but he still refers to it all as “immigrant food” and certainly doesn’t much like the stuff. The intriguing tension that lies just beneath the whole film — how does an essentially good-natured good ol’ boy come to terms with the complications of a polyglot, Prius-driving, Internet-wired culture? — is left almost entirely unexplored. (Citywide) (Mark Olsen)

LONESOME JIM The title character in this monotone new film from actor-turned-director Steve Buscemi would probably be a little less lonesome if he stopped being such a dick. A would-be writer who’s returned to his Indiana family after bottoming out in Manhattan, the 27-year-old Jim (Casey Affleck) advises his divorced older brother (Kevin Corrigan) to kill himself and is continually dismissive and occasionally cruel to both his mother (Mary Kay Place) and the beautiful nurse (Liv Tyler) he supposedly wants to date. Jim’s a louse because he’s depressed, but first-time screenwriter James C. Strouse (in whose hometown the film was shot) provides so few clues to the source of Jim’s malaise, or that of his entire sad-sack family, that the movie remains rudderless and not the least bit believable. Often, Affleck appears to be biting down on his own smile, as if he — or perhaps his director — believes that displaying a moment’s charm would betray Jim’s angst. Place, who has played her fair share of unappreciated Midwestern moms, could teach Affleck a thing or two about tension-filled smiles, but even she can’t breathe life into a character whose defining characteristic is her affection for a “World’s Greatest Grandmother” mug that Buscemi never tires of showing in close-up. (Selected theaters) (Chuck Wilson)

MARILYN HOTCHKISS BALLROOM DANCING AND CHARM SCHOOL In the ’70s, a movie with this many famous faces — John Goodman, Marisa Tomei, Mary Steenburgen, Camryn Manheim, Sean Astin and half a dozen others — would usually signal a disaster flick. In this case, it’s just a disaster. Co-writer–director Randall Miller has essentially grafted pointless celebrity cameos onto his own nostalgic 1990 short film about rowdy boys circa 1962 forced to attend cotillion and learning to like girls. Here, scenes from Miller’s short become the rowdy boyhood memories of a dying car-crash victim (Goodman), whose chance meeting with an emotionally shut-off widower (Robert Carlyle) inspires the latter to attend dance classes, where, surprise, love awaits with lonely-heart Tomei. It’s all a treacly, shoddily assembled, underwritten mess. Especially bizarre is that Miller did his modestly amusing short no favors by diluting it with the new stuff, which, of course, hardly feels new. Dancing With the Stars is more life-affirming. (Selected theaters) (Robert Abele)