Ice Age Live!, Motorpoint Arena, Cardiff, review To Cardiff with the Cavendish clan for an early autumnal sighting of the newly launched Ice Age arena show - the live spin-off to the world's most successful animated franchise. Mrs C is cautiously optimistic. The kids, devotees of the films, are keen: daughter (Anna, eight) is almost pole-vaulting over the Millennium Stadium with excitement, while son (Lucas, 11) is happy enough to shuffle along with the herd, provided we stop off at the city's Lego store en route. Pretty much the target audience for this extravaganza, then - it's a family show, according to co-director Guy Caron, who ran Cirque du Soleil in its infancy - we settle back into (pricey) front-row seats and wait for the fun to start. Two hours later and we're still waiting. It might be a slight exaggeration to describe the whole show as a mammoth waste of time and the victim of woolly artistic thinking but it's astounding that so much of the films" visual élan and wisecracking wit should have been rendered near-extinct by this format. The chief drawback proves to be the main selling-point: ice. It must have seemed a no-brainer to serve up an archetypal adventure - involving Manny and Ellie becoming separated from their daughter, Peaches - on a rink. But even with a coachload of athletic-acrobatic skaters working their socks off to a pre-recorded soundtrack, the show proceeds at a glacially slow pace, unable to do justice to the prehistoric scale of the beasts, while honouring the need for speed. Towering tall at 3.5 metres, Manny the mammoth makes an awesome sight but, like Ellie, he's so lumbering he'd be better off at the head of a float parade than leading the narrative charge. Peaches is a cute delight, as is Sid the sloth, the performer inside each fluffy costume gaining rare momentum as they whizz about. But the other smaller-scale critters - whether it's Diego the sabre-tooth tiger, or Scrat the acorn-chasing squirrel - struggle to impose themselves on the vast space. Introducing kids to bathos as well as ballet, the showdowns involving some dastardly vultures require the relevant performers to step out of their primary costumes to enact symbolic dance-battles on mini-platforms, draining all sense of jeopardy. About the slushy "songs" - dredging various genres and over-amplified to eardrum-testing levels - I can think of nothing polite to say. "Tusk-tusk" is the most apt response to the whole sorry, expensive episode. Tour details: www.iceagelive.com