Very funny review of Madagascar

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Mild kingdom
'Madagascar' can be cute and clever and occasionally it roars, but it's not as impressive as the marketing behind it
By Ty Burr, Globe Staff | May 27, 2005
Regardless of the merits of ''Madagascar," I think we can all agree that the marketing campaign has been a breathtaking achievement, a mass-scale act of brand imprinting that deserves the full four stars.
As far back as last October, my younger daughter was already lisping, ''Father? May I please see 'Madagascar' when it opens wide on May 27th?" By December, she and her friends knew all the major characters -- How? When? Was this information delivered on a subsonic level during commercial breaks on Nickelodeon? Hidden in specially marked bags of Skittles? -- and there were rumors that DreamWorks PR had offered a year's college tuition to toddlers whose first word was ''Madagascar." The plush, talking penguin tie-in toy that appeared on my desk a month ago (it had become known that my daughter was a penguin freak) could be considered a bribe only if she had had any remaining mind share to be exploited.
The problem with such an approach is that the movie had better live up to the hype, and outside of Pixar, precious few of the new computer-animated family films deliver. So that deflating sound you hear is ''Madagascar" itself entering theaters: Antic, cute, scattershot, it's a remarkable-looking but terribly uncertain bit of CGI fluff, with its richest humor off to the sides of the action and a whole lot of average in the middle.
As your kids already know, we begin in New York's Central Park Zoo, where Alex the lion (Ben Stiller) is the pampered, preening star of the show. Think of him as an overpriced infielder for the Yankees: dining on steak, hitting the home runs, getting a little lazy. Over in the zebra pen is Marty (Chris Rock), whose high spirits have been laid low by a midlife crisis (he's 7). Marty knows there's more out there, but what? Connecticut?
''Madagascar" shakes a few solid laughs out of these citified animals -- I loved the chimp whose morning routine consists of fishing a cup of coffee, a bagel, and the Times out of a trash can -- and it introduces an element of prankish anarchy in a quartet of penguins making a jailbreak for Antarctica. (The lead penguin, Skipper, is a barking megalomaniac who sounds something like the love child of Danny DeVito and Edward G. Robinson; in fact, it's the voice of co-director Tom McGrath, pulling a Brad Bird.)
Convinced by the penguins that ''the wild" is the place to be, Marty makes a break for it, followed by the panicking Alex, a hypochondriac giraffe named Melman (David Schwimmer, neurasthenic as ever), and a homegirl hippo named Gloria (Jada Pinkett Smith). After a few plot contortions, the quartet ends up shipped back to Africa, lost in a storm at sea, and washed ashore on the beaches of Madagascar, that large island with all the lemurs to the right of Mozambique.
Here's where the movie's visual approach starts paying dividends. The scenes at the zoo have looked boxy and unconvincing, like a Sims game from six years back, but the Madagascar of ''Madagascar" has the feel of a Rousseau painting -- all dark-outlined greenery and profusions of bright colors -- and the hyperstylized characters, who already look like they could have stepped from the pages of a mid-'50s Golden Book, fit right in.
If only the rest of the movie matched that level of invention. ''Madagascar" has two modes, slapstick and sitting around talking, and while the former is well-timed and diverting -- it helps if you're a ''Road Runner" fan -- the latter starts to drag. Marty and Alex have a beachfront feud that goes on forever, and the later scenes, in which the lion must come to grips with his inner carnivore, are allowed to become overly serious. I don't know that I've ever complained about too much character development before, but when a movie's surface is this beguiling, you want to stay there.
While they're trying to get off the island, the zoo animals meet a tribe of lemurs led by the happy-happy, not very bright partyboy King Julien XIII (Sacha Baron Cohen, a.k.a. Ali G). He has a morose assistant named Maurice (Cedric the Entertainer) and a saucer-eyed, hyperbolically ''cute" mouse lemur sidekick (Andy Richter). All these folks are great fun, as are the penguins, as are those chimps (one with a naff Terry-Thomas British accent voiced by Conrad Vernon, the other smelly and mute). Unfortunately, they're more fun than the leads.

http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2005/05/27/mild_kingdom/ (Open in New Window)

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Topic - Very funny review of Madagascar - clarkjohnsen 09:29:26 05/27/05 (2)

Re: Very funny review of Madagascar - rico 11:56:55 05/27/05 (1)

I note that opinions on it have varied considerably. nt - clarkjohnsen 08:57:11 05/28/05 (0)

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