Review: Stone Age animated tale 'The Croods: A New Age' packs too many characters and not enough laughs

Just in time for Thanksgiving comes “The Croods: A New Age,” an overstuffed bird of a movie with too many characters and not enough genuinely funny gags.

You may recall (or, like me, maybe you didn’t) meeting the Croods in their 2013 animated debut. They are a not-so-modern Stone Age family, with protective parents Grug (voiced by Nicolas Cage) and Ugga (voiced by Catherine Keener) guiding their children — teen daughter Eep (voiced by Emma Stone), dimbulb son Thunk (voiced by Clark Duke) and semi-feral youngster Sandy (voiced this time by Kailey Crawford) — and aging Gran (voiced by Cloris Leachman) through a prehistoric land where everything seems ready to kill them. In the first movie, the family met the slightly more evolved Guy (voiced by Ryan Reynolds), who became part of their group and Eep’s instant crush.

The sequel starts with Eep and Guy’s swooning romance, with Guy talking about how his deceased parents urged him to find his future in a place called Tomorrow. Meanwhile, Grug is worried both about Eep will leave the family to go off with Guy — if they aren’t all killed by every predator out in the wild. 

Then the family finds a sanctuary, free of deadly animals and filled with bounteous food — all of it growing in oddly straight rows. Soon they meet the more-evolved people who live here: The Bettermans. (Character names in this franchise are not subtle.) Phil (voiced by Peter Dinklage) and Hope (voiced by Leslie Mann) welcome the Croods as guests. Guy, whose family knew the Bettermans, is welcomed as a long lost friend — and reunited with Guy’s childhood friend, Dawn Betterman (voiced by Kelly Marie Tran), setting up a potential triangle with Eep.

That’s a lot of plot for one animated movie to carry, and we haven’t even gotten to the mysterious threat beyond the Betterman’s compound walls. And 10 characters is more than this much-handled script (with four credited writers, plus franchise creators Kirk DeMicco and Chris Sanders getting story credit) and director Joel Crawford, a story artist on the “Kung Fu Panda” films and making his directing debut here, can comfortably carry.

What’s worse, “The Croods: A New Age” isn’t funny. There are moments clearly meant to be funny, but the jokes wither on the vine, and through weak conception or labored execution fail to generate more than a chuckle. 

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‘The Croods: A New Age’

★★

Opening Wednesday, November 25, in theaters where open. Rated PG for peril, action and rude humor. Running time: 95 minutes.