The Croods: A New Age movie review- Emma Stone, Ryan Reynolds’ adventure comedy pulls at your heartstrings with its innocence

3/5

Story: The Croods continue to spend their days combatting the elements of Nature by forming prompt ‘kill circles.’ Hoewver, a chance encounter brings them before the Bettermans, Hope and Phil. They inform the Croods that they have cultivated the stream’s water and developed the sanctuary, which also houses their overly protected daughter Dawn. As the Bettermans try to woo Guy for Dawn, Eep discovers a whole new world of adventures.

When Croods released in 2013, Universal brought to the world yet another Flinstones-esque story that managed to tug at all our heartstrings. Keenly following the neanderthal family of overprotective alpha father Grug (Nicolas Cage), mother Ugga (Catherine Keener), the children Eep (Emma Stone), Thunk (Clark Duke), and Sandy (Kailey Crawford) and the eldest Gran (Cloris Leachman), and their newest ‘suave’ addition Guy (Ryan Reynolds), The Croods was all about a single-family against the big bad world.

The Croods: A New Age is zippy and zany. It takes place at a juncture of crisis, when the Croods are still rampaging the Stone Age, trying to survive each day against an odd lot of mash-up wilder beasts. A chance encounter with the obviously named Bettermans, Phil and Hope (Peter Dinklage and Leslie Mann), bring the motley crew smack at the centre of ‘civilisation’. The Bettermans, an annoyingly condescending lot, are old friends of Guy’s deceased parents, and immediately target him as their future son-in-law, all the while plotting to separate him from Eep and the rest of the cantankerous family.

The Bettermans are technically more advanced, but somehow their manipulative ways are too devious to redeem their fallow souls. The Croods, on the other hand, are uncouth and inappropriate, seemingly bashing through bamboo walls and doors, stinking up the entire ambience and hurling food at each other. Yet, theirs is a bond that endures, that ensures each and every person be accounted for.

The sequel places this apparently refined world and the obviously crude old world against each other with Guy as the representative of this tussle. Dawn (Kelly Marie Tran), the Bettermans over sheltered daughter and Eep hence become the two ends of the spectrum from which Guy should choose. But credit to the writers, they refuse to pit one girl against the other. The two teenagers are far more interested in exploring their new-found bff-ship and are more than glad to explore each other’s ways of living, instead of fanning insecurities about a single boy.

A New Age promises better visuals, snazzier CGIs and an upgraded level of Croods’ pandemonium and it delivers on all three fronts. However, the makers tend to stretch certain tropes that came oh-so naturally in the 2013 feature. For example, Grug’s Father of the Bride-esque unhealthy protectiveness towards Eep gets a tad tedious by the end of the narrative, when he continues his skeptical outlook towards Guy. At some junctures, his overbearing need to keep the family together also comes across as unnecessary and contrived. Stone and Reynolds whip up a hilariously adorable chemistry (yet again) with their hour-long sessions of “hey”s while dreamily looking into each other’s eyes.

Verdict: The sequel is everything fun. From its action-packed adventure sequences to the oddball characters, The Croods: A New Age is the perfect follow-up to the 2013 film.