23. The Croods: A New Age
This was another fun film and a surprisingly good sequel to a really great film.
If you’ve seen the last one then you already know that our boy Guy (Ryan Reynolds) has officially hooked up with the Croods. This film begins with Guy remembering losing his parents as a kid and going off in search of “tomorrow”. This film is more about exploring what “tomorrow” actually is and what it means to him. Basically, it’s just him being together with Eep Crood (Emma Stone), daughter of Grug Crood (Nicolas Cage).
When the Croods come across a wall that leads them into this beautifully designed and rendered paradise, they meet The Bettermans. Phil Betterman (Peter Dinklage), Hope Betterman (Leslie Mann), and their wonderful daughter, Dawn Betterman (Kelly Marie Tran). The parents here are basically the prehistoric time period version of the troupe of the better neighbors. You know, the ones that are snooty, sophisticated, and all around better than you and your ragtag group of animalistic family members? That’s what the Bettermans are. They’re better than you and they prove it by living in a makeshift tree house with makeshift elevators and makeshift toilets with makeshift tools, utensils, and other old equivalents to modern society.
They're those folks that live in gated communities and get all weird about you setting drinks on the table without a coaster.
Grug, the disgruntled dad who was eventually won over by Guy and managed to learn how to get ideas, naturally does not like living in paradise at first because it introduces concepts like the privacy of having your own room and… not being together all the time.
Yeah, his hang up is a bit simple too but it’s based on his simple caveman logic. It’s fine.
Right off the bat, what I really appreciate about this film is that it plays with the troupes you’ve seen in films a million times before. Because the Bettermans used to know Guy and his parents, they think that he should stay with them and get together with their daughter Dawn. However, Dawn never once shows any romantic interest in Guy. The two of them love each other and get along great but it’s pretty obviously just a platonic friendship relationship. Not only that but she’s not stuck up and prissy like her parents. Instead, she’s a lot like Eep. She wants to go outside the walls and have an adventure but she’s not allowed to because of what happened to Guy’s parents all those years ago.
Initially, when you meet Dawn and you see how well her and Guy are getting along, you start to see Eep staring hard at her and making faces that seem to indicate that she might be jealous of her. It’s that “Oh here we go. She sees him getting along with another girl and is gonna hate her and start getting irrationally protective of him.”
Instead of that bullshit, Eep is excited to meet another teenage girl her age. She is over the fucking moon about Dawn and the two of them hang out. She’s the one who ends up helping Dawn achieve her dream of having an adventure outside the walls. This is where part of the actual conflict comes in but the relationship troubles that Eep and Guy do eventually get into doesn’t really have anything to do with Dawn specifically. That was a breath of fresh air.
Another breath of fresh air was during the scene where Phil was trying to trick Grug into being on his side and striking a deal to get Guy to stay with the Bettermans. I initially thought he was going to be all secretive about it and try to do this horrible thing to get rid of this guy they allowed into their family just because he was afraid of his daughter leaving.
But no. After the scene where that happens, Ugga (Catherine Keener), his wife, confides in Grug that Hope tried to do the same thing to her and they get really mad about it together. They see through the attempted deception and get into an argument about it with the Bettermans later at the dinner table.
It did make me wonder a few times what the conflict was going to be but then I realized that the conflict between the two families WAS the issue. They shouldn’t be fighting. They should be trying to get along. It ends up being a long, tough road because Phil neglects to tell everyone why he has this strange rule about no one being allowed to eat any of the bananas.
Once Grug and Ugga eat them out of spite for the way they’ve been treated, they get captured by the Punch Monkeys and it leads to an entirely fresh and new sequences of action and adventure that made this hour and a half long movie feel like it had a shit ton of stuff in it. It really felt like a movie packed to the brim with enough content to feel like a long as hell Marvel movie of some kind. I want other movies to be as good at pacing as this film is.
To make me think a film is longer than it actually is by utilizing the amount of things that happen in it rather than it just being boring is a feat. Good show.
Other than that though there isn’t a ton more to say about it. The style and animation is great. It’s not THE most creative thing Dreamworks has ever done but it certainly stands out in a few places. As the years have gone by they’ve just gotten better and better at showing off and it really does pay off.
Since it came out in 2020, I was worried it might not have done well at the box office but no. It did really good actually! It having a budget of only 65 Million probably helped but still. This film was a success and it deserved it.
The Croods are a great stone age family to follow and I wouldn’t mind seeing them again to be honest.
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4 months, 1 week ago
06 Apr 2025 03:38 CEST
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