The Croods: A New Age review: The wholesome, zany sequel nobody asked for

Dir: Joel Crawford. Starring: Nicolas Cage, Emma Stone, Ryan Reynolds, Catherine Keener, Clark Duke, Cloris Leachman. U, 95 minutes.

I’m not quite sure who was crying out for The Croods: A New Age. It’s the sequel to a 2013 animated film about a family of Neanderthals – a perfectly pleasant venture that made a decent amount of money, but whose only real cultural contribution was allowing Nicolas Cage to scream and grunt to his heart’s content. Still, in defiance of this vague sense of pointlessness, The Croods: A New Age manages to feel like a genuine creative endeavour and not a last resort.

It’s a primeval fantasy with a kaleidoscope palette, inhabited by artful little creature hybrids, like wolves with spider’s legs and cow print-patterned mammoths. It may pale in comparison to some of the other animated features out this year, namely The Mitchells vs the Machines and Pixar’s Luca, but it’s wholesome and zany enough to stand on its own two feet.

It opens jarringly, with a flashback to the sudden and traumatising death of two people. They’re the parents of Guy (Ryan Reynolds), a homo sapien whose orphaning at a young age eventually saw him fall in with the Crood family – elder Gran (Cloris Leachman), patriarch Grug (Cage), matriarch Ugga (Catherine Keener), and their children Eep (Emma Stone), Thunk (Clark Duke), and Sandy (Kailey Crawford). Guy and Eep believe themselves to be the only teenagers in existence, so naturally they’ve fallen insufferably in love and now crave their independence. This is much to the overprotective Grug’s dismay.

The sanctity of the Crood clan comes under further threat when they stumble into the paradisal home of the Bettermans (Peter Dinklage and Leslie Mann), old friends of Guy’s parents who are a couple of steps further down the road to civilisation. Their treehouse estate comes with windows, walls, elevators, and irrigated fields. The Croods: A New Age is really just another version of the old “keeping up with the Joneses” dilemma. And it only works on that level – apply any kind of metaphor and the whole thing soon falls apart. But Mann and Dinklage play their roles with such a West Coast, airheaded, toothy-smiled passive-aggressiveness that the film is still able to squeeze a few good jokes out of the premise. Cage, as before, delivers the perfect amount of hysteria – not too little, not too much.

The Croods: A New Age even manages to sneak in a little feminist messaging, though not in a way that feels too forced or pandering to its audience. The Bettermans’s daughter, Dawn (Kelly Marie Tran), is initially presented as a romantic rival to Eep, before it becomes clear that she’s far more interested in the prospect of her first female friend. Later on, there’s an unexpected nod to the latter half of Mad Max: Fury Road. It’s not exactly enough to justify The Croods becoming a fully fledged franchise, but neither does this sequel overstay its welcome.