Review: The Croods

It’d be hard for anyone born in the ’90s not to have seen a film that director/writer Chris Sanders has not worked on.

His filmography includes both classic Disney hits (“Beauty and the Beast,” “Aladdin”) and more recent family movies (“How to Train Your Dragon”), which could be the reason that his and co-director Kirk Demicco’s latest production “The Croods” feels so familiar.

Starring a family of cavemen, “The Croods” is a more or less nominal story, one part family dysfunction and the other part journey of self-discovery. Father Grug, voiced by none other than Nicholas Cage, leads his tribe of Neanderthals through a placid life of hunting and gathering with the motto “never not be afraid.” Newness is dangerous in a world inhabited by giant, flesh-eating cats, and it should be avoided at all costs.

This suits everyone in the Crood tribe just fine, save for Grug’s strong-willed daughter Eep (Emma Stone), who pines away for a life outside of the cave walls.

Fortunately for Eep, adventure comes in the form of Guy (Ryan Reynolds — which would explain why he’s always shirtless),  a dashing homo sapien with a pet sloth who brings fire and a prophecy of doom. The world is ending, he says, and the only salvation involves a strenuous trek cross-country to high ground, “to the light — to tomorrow.”

How he knows this, or what he was doing in Crood country in the first place, remains a mystery, as there’s little to no backstory about the young man. Instead, we get lots of chase scenes, a love story and an eventual wilderness journey to the land of tomorrow that flows about as smoothly as a family car trip.

Crood world, though, is as lush as the promised land Guy describes, with dizzying colors, hybrid beasts (elephant mice, cat boars) and an imagination that sustains even the most cliché daddy-daughter relationship. What’s more, the film doesn’t cater to its 3-D in the obvious ways that most family films have a habit of doing.

Though the whole of “The Croods,” from its characters to its cute monsters, may echo Disney or “How to Train Your Dragon” too much, the film is still a visual delight punctuated with a nice message of family loyalty and open-mindedness. There’s nothing “crood” about that.