"Ice Age 3" -- thawed

More than $100 million to make and market it, and a good 500 man-years’ worth of effort, and all they could come up with was “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs.”

Thoroughly mediocre and mildly entertaining at best, this second sequel to “Ice Age” shows what happens when filmmakers stop thinking in terms of making movies and begin thinking about making franchises. They can throw all the money and effort they want into a movie, and it still comes down to the script.

The script to “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs” plays out like a first draft. The story isn’t focused, the jokes aren’t sharp and the plot skims through the path of least resistance. The one part that does seem polished is the atypically well-conceived and well-executed climax. It is both relatively thrilling and somewhat funny, and the movie may have been an artistic success had only the entire thing been made with this kind of care and effort.

We’re talking about the first climax here. The utterly unnecessary second climax is just lame, and in fact it detracts from our memories of the first. It also points out just one of the ways that this movie (like so many others) simply does not know how or when to end.

Once again, we follow the exploits of Manny the Mammoth. Manny -- his voice is by Ray Romano, who is clearly just picking up a paycheck -- is now a family mammoth. His mate, Ellie (Queen Latifah), is pregnant, and Manny is doing fatherly things, like panicking unhumorously when he believes Ellie is about to give birth and building a playground for the kid.

When Diego the Sabretooth Tiger (Denis Leary) makes an unsuccessful bid to escape from the movie, Sid the Sloth (John Leguizamo -- no wonder he isn’t funny!) feels left out and decides to adopt three eggs he finds in an ice cave. They turn out to be dinosaur eggs, which may be chronologically inexact but at least the babies are awfully cute.

Our heroes wind up going to The Lost World, where dinosaurs still cavort under the icy crust of Earth. There they meet the fearless Buck, a crusty Cockney pirate weasel with the voice of Simon Pegg.

We can see the thought process going on here. Kids love dinosaurs. Kids love pirates. Let’s throw them together in a story about the Ice Age.

And that’s the difference between a franchise and a movie.

That squirrel trying to get the acorn is back this time, too, adding nothing to the story (again) and in fact acting completely independently of the story (again). This time, he fights and falls for a comely flying squirrel to musical variations on the Lou Rawls hit “You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine.” Kids won’t get the joke; their parents will get it but they won’t find it funny.

Which is the problem with the film. Too much of it just doesn’t try hard enough.