Was anyone (other than DreamWorks Animation executives) really clamoring for a sequel to 2013’s The Croods? The movie about a prehistoric family of cave-people was a box-office hit and even received a Best Animated Feature Oscar nomination, but it hasn’t become a pop-culture phenomenon like other DreamWorks Animation franchises, including Shrek, Kung Fu Panda and Madagascar. Nevertheless, here we are with The Croods: A New Age, which does what too many animated franchise sequels do: Takes a small-scale adventure story and turns it into a big action spectacle while largely rehashing the themes of the first movie.
In The Croods, family patriarch Grug (voiced by Nicolas Cage) felt inferior to Guy (Ryan Reynolds), a handsome, confident and evolved young man who catches the attention of Grug’s teenage daughter, Eep (Emma Stone), and introduces the family to scary (but valuable) new ideas that shake Grug’s limited world view. By the end of the first movie, Grug and Guy had learned to respect each other’s strengths, and the Crood family, now embracing Guy as one of their own, had set out to find a new place to live.
In A New Age, Grug and the other Croods are once again confronted with more evolved humans, in this case the pointedly named Bettermans, Phil (Peter Dinklage) and Hope (Leslie Mann) and their teenage daughter Dawn (Kelly Marie Tran). An opening flashback expands on Guy’s childhood, when he watched his parents die in a tar pit, and then struck out on his own to find a promised land he calls “tomorrow.” The Bettermans knew Guy when he was a kid, and the verdant valley where they live in a fancy treehouse home (with prehistoric-style gadgets that bring the franchise even closer to its obvious inspiration The Flintstones) represents the home that Guy has been searching for.
With their flip-flops, swooping hairstyles, crystal pendants and loose, casual outfits, the Bettermans embody a modern idea of “new age,” and they look down on the unsophisticated Croods, hoping to boot out the cave-people while keeping Guy around as a potential mate for Dawn. Guy, however, has fallen head over heels in love with Eep, and their teenage romance is one of the movie’s most irritating elements. In the original, it was clear that Guy and Eep had a connection, but the filmmakers smartly focused on Eep’s desire for independence and adventure, rather than the insipid romance that dominates her arc this time around.
Although these characters don’t have a conception of marriage, Guy essentially “proposes” to Eep early in the movie, and Grug spends most of the movie scheming to keep the two of them from leaving the family unit and heading out on their own. It’s mostly the same conflict that he dealt with in the first movie, and even though he’s supposedly now more enlightened, he’s still obsessed with being in charge of everything the family does. In contrast, the Bettermans present themselves as free spirits, even though they have just as many rules and guidelines as the Croods do.
They aren’t exactly villains, though, and the movie never quite gets a handle on how to present them. Like Eep, Dawn is sheltered and yearns to explore the outside world, and the friendship between the two teenage girls (as opposed to a more clichéd conflict over Guy) is the movie’s only real progression in terms of character development. There are silly misunderstandings that lead the characters to get mad at each other, but all of that is thrown away for a massive, poorly plotted action finale, in which many of the characters take on superhero-style alter egos to fight a giant monster.
The new filmmakers (including director Joel Crawford and four credited writers, taking over for original writer-directors Chris Sanders and Kirk DeMicco) retcon the elderly Gran (Cloris Leachman) into a badass warrior woman, in a forced effort to highlight female empowerment (and probably to create more spin-off opportunities). What started out as a somewhat sweet family story turns into a chaotic battle to the death.
That giant battle allows the animators to show off their skills, though, and A New Age also carries on one of the first movie’s most entertaining devices, creating prehistoric animal hybrids as theoretical missing links on the evolutionary chain. The design of animals like kangadillos, moommoths (cows crossed with woolly mammoths) and wolf-spiders (cute eight-legged, eight-eyed wolves that spin webs) is creative and appealing, perfect for merchandising but also contributing to the movie’s unique world. The design for the main human characters has also gotten more detailed, although both Eep and her mother Ugga (Catherine Keener) seem to have been streamlined a bit to make them more traditionally feminine.
A New Age is bright and lively enough to hold the attention of its target kid audience, but parents stuck with holiday viewings will probably quickly grow tired of the Crood family’s increasingly manic antics. As far as DreamWorks franchises go, this one seems like it’s at an evolutionary dead end.
Starring the voices of Nicolas Cage, Emma Stone, Ryan Reynolds, Catherine Keener, Clark Duke, Cloris Leachman, Peter Dinklage, Leslie Mann and Kelly Marie Tran, The Croods: A New Age opens Wednesday, Nov. 25 in theaters nationwide.