The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild (2022)

I owe myself an apology. Not because I sat down to watch The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild, because honestly that was unavoidable. My kid loves Buck. He's been one of the better things in the Ice Age franchise for years, all manic energy and eye-patch swagger, the sort of character who makes you think maybe there's more fun to be wrung out of this world yet. So when this one landed on Disney+, the remote was basically already out of my hands. No, I owe myself an apology because some small, naive part of me thought it might be alright.

It is not alright. It is not even close to alright.

This isn't just a bad animated film. Plenty of animated films are bad in ways that are at least comprehensible, where you can see what they were going for and how they fell short. This is something else. This feels like the result of a licensing agreement being honoured under duress, a film produced with the enthusiasm and budget of a screensaver, handed off to people who were told to make something that technically qualifies as a movie and were not given any further guidance. The animation looks like it melted. I don't mean it looks rough or unpolished. I mean it looks like someone took the original Ice Age films, left them out in the sun, and then filmed the puddle.

The plot, such as it is, involves a pair of honey badger characters who I am generously describing as annoying teens, running around the Lost World doing dumb stuff, while Buck careens around them trying to keep things interesting. He cannot keep things interesting. It is not his fault. He is working with nothing. The jokes either don't land because they're aimed at a very young audience with maximum condescension, or they don't land because they simply aren't jokes so much as things characters say before moving on to the next scene. I sat there waiting, genuinely waiting, for something to make me smile. A visual gag, a bit of wordplay, anything. It never came.

What really stings is that Buck as a character deserves better than this. There's a version of a Buck Wild spinoff that could have been genuinely entertaining, leaning into his anarchic energy and building a proper adventure around him. Instead, he's been sidelined in his own film, reduced to a supporting act for two characters nobody asked to spend more time with. It's the kind of creative decision that makes you wonder if anyone involved actually watched the films that came before, or just read a two-line character description and called it research.

I've sat through some rough watches in the name of this blog. I've even found things to appreciate in films that most people have written off entirely. But there's a particular kind of hollow that comes with a film that feels genuinely indifferent to your time. The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild doesn't fail spectacularly. It doesn't even fail interestingly. It just sort of exists, grey and joyless, until the credits roll and you wonder what you could have watched instead. If you're after genuinely good animation that respects its audience, I'd point you toward Josep, which shows what the medium can do when real care goes into it.

My kid sat through the whole thing. He said it was "okay." That's the most damning review of all, really. This is a franchise character he genuinely loves, given his own film, and the best a child who will happily rewatch things until the disc wears out could manage was "okay." When you've lost the seven-year-olds, it's over.

One star. And I'm being generous because Buck's voice performance at least suggests someone showed up with a pulse.

Rating: ★  | Year: 2022  | Watched: 2025-07-21

View on Letterboxd →

Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Stream: Disney Plus
Physical: Amazon US

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