The Croods

Story: Grug Crood's (Cage) brute strength and hunting prowess has helped his family - wife Ugga (Keener), daughter Eep (Stone), son Thunk (Duke), mother- in-law Gran (Cloris Leachman) and baby Sandy (Randy Thom) - survive over the years as a tight-knit unit living in a cave. Their life is thrown out of gear with the arrival of Guy (Reynolds), a drifter who believes 'the end is coming'. Grug's daughter Eep takes to Guy strongly. Should Grug be worried?

Movie Review: The film grabs you as early as the action-packed opening hunt sequence with a quick character introduction along with a gander at other prehistoric creatures that could only have come out of someone's imagination.

The story. Well, it's a fairly simple one. Something not quite unlike another recent release about a prehistoric family (of woolly mammoths and other assorted friends) plot-wise. The detailing, rendering, textures and stereography in Croods, however, is miles ahead of that film. Some scenes are worth watching out for.

The voice cast in The Croods is competent, the gags come thick and fast and almost never let up, leaving you in guffaws more often than not. The new spin brought to an old concept actually works with limited characters. Despite the predictable premise, you're eager to see what comes next. The movie cruises along at a healthy running time and that's actually a blessing as most films in the genre tend to be over-indulgent. A fresh, fun and mostly footloose feature, you wish there was more to the story than just a race 'into the light'. The premise's inherent simplicity is just as easily its only undoing.