Column:
'Escape 2 Africa' could be worse
The main characters distract from the funny side stories.
Published Nov. 17, 2008
"Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa" could have been worse, really. This is high praise on one hand, inasmuch as it is from DreamWorks, whose work - "Shrek", et al - usually deserves no praise at all. But on the other - if it's from DreamWorks, and it is not so shrill and uncomfortable as to beg you to leave the theater before the end of the movie, of course it could have been worse. "Madagascar 2" is not awful, and if you are in the theater during its 89-minute runtime you will not be desperate to get out. That is the sort of unequivocal praise, after the "Shrek" sequels, that they should put in the trailers.
"Madagascar 2" begins with the DreamWorks special, a grating, frenetic, vaguely hip song-and-dance sequence that has nothing to do with the movie at hand. Here it is performed to "I Like to Move It." There is a lot of howling and CG rump-shaking. Having dispensed with that formality we get to the plot, which begins as a direct sequel to the first movie.
Our heroes, Marty the zebra, Alex the lion, Melman the giraffe and Gloria the hippo, all voiced by vaguely recognizable stars, all possessing one character trait - a sassy girl character! a neurotic guy character! Chris Rock! - are set to leave Madagascar for New York, in the care of a fleet of mechanically minded penguins who've rebuilt a plane. The plane crashes and they end up in Africa instead.
Many of the side characters in "Madagascar 2" are funny. The penguins, for example, are expertly voiced (by non-stars) and have a wonderfully devious way of finding the parts to rebuild their plane, which involves a lot of carefully planned "Rainbow Six" squad strikes against tourist Jeeps. And one of the tourists - a prototypical Borscht Belt mother archetype - gives a rousing speech about America and ends up inadvertently striking a Statue of Liberty pose.
But the main characters kill any goodwill engendered by these side trips every time. They're all given a personal problem about a half an hour in and set up for a saccharine, pat resolution, and nobody involved seems to have noticed that it's ridiculous that a movie that begins and ends with liking to move-it-move-it has crammed in four mindless, stentorian lessons where it should be aiming for more laughs.
And what kind of lessons are these? In the end Ben Stiller the lion learns that he is fated to a particular role because of his station in life; and David Schwimmer the giraffe learns not to trust people, I guess, and stand up to large hippopotamuses; and Chris Rock the zebra learns to not hang out with other zebras, maybe? These lessons are as garbled as they are ill-advised, but in the end they're more symptomatic of the problem with DreamWorks animation than they are the problems themselves.
But there aren't as many dated pop culture references, and there are less uneasy, grimy sexual undertones per child-in-theater, and Mike Myers doesn't voice eight characters, and the penguins really are kind of endearing. So it could be worse.
