'Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs' a roaring good time

For those who like their non-threatening excuses to sit in air conditioning and buy the tie-in toys, there's always Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs.

In Ice Age, Ellie (Queen Latifah, Hairspray) and Manny (Ray Romano, Everybody Loves Raymond) the mammoths are expecting a baby. Sid the sloth (John Leguizamo, The Happening), wanting a baby of his own, discovers three large and seemingly abandoned eggs in a cave and decides to raise them.

When the eggs hatch baby dinosaurs and mama dinosaur comes looking for them, Sid is taken with them to an underground world where dinosaurs still reign.

Ellie and Manny, along with Eddie and Crash the possums (Josh Peck and Seann William Scott, respectively) and Diego the sabre-toothed tiger (Dennis Leary, Rescue Me) have to then save Sid before he winds up as somebody's breakfast.

Things I liked about Ice Age:

1. Probably the most beloved character in these movies is Scrat and his acorn. With the addition of the lovely Scratte, who is first his opponent and then his love interest, there is a whole new (almost love-triangle-esque) dynamic to his side plot. Hats off to the animators for being able to make an acorn look jealous.

2. New to the herd is Buck (Simon Pegg, Star Trek), a slightly loony weasel with an eye patch who hunts dinosaurs. His antics and cute little under bite got a lot of laughs from the audience.

3. The "camera" angles got pretty creative at parts. For example, a few times they showed a chase through the eyes of Diego, which makes you really feel like a sabre-toothed tiger when you watch it in 3-D.

Things I disliked about Ice Age:

1. On the funny scale, the possums were a miss. Not even the kids in the audience laughed at their obvious potty jokes.

2. Kids won't care, but for the adults the mechanics of an entire tropical dinosaur world existing underneath a thin layer of ice is prehistorically preposterous.

3. It felt like Sid didn't get to do what he does best in this movie, since he was separated from the herd for most of it and, therefore, couldn't annoy them.

All in all, both movies were enjoyable for their respective audiences to which they were aimed. This makes for an ideal way to spend a hot summer day: letting a responsible, acorn-loving adult chaperone the kids in one movie, while the rest of the adults enjoy a thrilling shoot out on running boards in the other.