The Croods
Review by Anthony Morris
It's caveman times - which doesn't mean it's a great time to be a caveman, as the opening of The Croods makes abundantly clear.
In fact, all the local cave families are dead – killed by the abundance of dangers that have caused the Crood family to live by the motto "never not be afraid".
Father Grug (the voice of Nicolas Cage) enforces the rules; daughter Eep (Emma Stone) dreams of not having to run back to the cave the second there's a loud noise or it starts to get dark.
It's on one of her nocturnal ventures outside the cave that she meets Guy (Ryan Renyolds), a somewhat more evolved homo sapiens – for one thing, he has fire, which Eep finds pretty impressive.
But he also has bad news: the world as they know it is coming to an end, with earthquakes and floods and lava and a whole lot of other bad stuff, and if they stay where they are they'll die.
Grug takes some convincing, but when the ground opens up under their feet he, Eep and the rest of the family – wife Ugga (Catherine Keener), feral baby Sandy (Randy Thom), dim-witted son Thunk (Clark Duke), and loathed mother-in-law (Cloris Leachman) – go on a wild and crazy journey across strange new lands.
This latest effort from DreamWorks Animation continues their solid efforts to be not quite as good as Disney / Pixar while still being entertaining enough for younger audiences.
There's a lot of okay action sequences here, especially early on, and most of the increasingly fantastic animals – we're talking flying turtles, tiny elephants, a pair of cute rodents who share the same tail and what looks like a giant sabre-toothed kitten – are fun to look at.
The character stuff is also reasonably well handled, even if the cavemen’s intelligence varies depending on the jokes. But things get increasingly sappy towards the feel-good ending, with the last half hour or so being almost laugh-free as Grug realises his little girl is growing up and so on.
If you're in charge of kids, you could certainly do worse; if you’re not, Cage and Stone aren’t exactly hard to find in better films.
3 out of 5
The Croods
Australian release: 28th March, 2013
Official Site: The Croods
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Ryan Reynolds, Emma Stone, Catherine Keener, Clark Duke, Cloris Leachman
Director: Chris Sanders, Kirk DeMicco
