There’s a certain alchemy to making a kids’ movie: How do you have a film simple enough to follow and colorful enough to keep a young audience’s attention without driving parents to the brink of insanity? For every Pixar movie there are 10 Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwreckeds. It’s a tricky mix to achieve: smart but not too smart, broad but not condescending, frantic enough to keep a child interested for 90 minutes but relaxed enough to prevent parents from leaving the theatre clutching their throbbing heads.
Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted mostly gets the mix right. When last we left our gang of fugitive zoo animals, including well-meaning hippo, Gloria (Jada Pinkett-Smith); her husband, skittish giraffe Melman (David Schwimmer); and enthusiastic zebra Marty (Chris Rock), they were still in Africa, pining for a way to get back to their beloved Central Park Zoo (even the animals from New York are prone to self-mythologizing). Having been ditched by enterprising penguins and chimps who have decided to gamble in Monte Carlo instead of getting help in their makeshift plane, lion Alex (voice of Ben Stiller) takes his band of misfit animals after the selfish penguins, making enough of a ruckus in Monte Carlo – the casino frowns on lions, giraffes, zebras and hippos on the casino floor, it turns out – to earn the attention of Chantel DuBois (Frances McDormand), the driven leader of Animal Control, basically a Terminator in lipstick on a scooter. And French. She wants a lion’s head for her trophy room, and she thinks Alex’s would look good mounted on a plaque.
They barely escape the relentless Captain DuBois by stowing away on a circus train, where they encounter an ornery Russian tiger (Bryan Cranston of “Breaking Bad”), a sea lion (Martin Short) of slightly below average intelligence and a credulous leopard named Gia (The Help’s Jessica Chastain) who catches Alex’s eye. They’re only allowed on the train if they’re circus animals, and their desperation immediately puts them out of their depth as they pretend to be trained in things like “trapeze Americano.” But the final stop, if their show can impress an American backer in London, is New York City, and even then Captain DuBois is never far behind them.
Trailer:
Madagascar 3 wisely throws a wink and a nod to the parents in the audience even as its delivers the goofiness for kids. It can have a romance between a lemur and a bear (their love is real!) as they cavort through the streets of Rome and have a small child shoved up an elephant’s butt within minutes of each other. (The kid’s fine, by the way.) In the movie’s most dazzling display (3D, even post-production conversions, always seems to work better with animation), the animals leap and spin through neon spirals in a spectacular set piece with Katy Perry’s “Firework” blaring in the background. The colors are certainly bright, the action over-the-top, and there’s plenty of snappy patter to go around – between Short’s dim sea lion and Sacha Baron Cohen’s lemur king, there’s no shortage of gifted banterers. It’s bright and bouncy with enough room for a running joke about Louis XIV. With three directors and two screenwriters (among them, inexplicably, The Squid and the Whale auteur Noah Baumbach), the production is something of a three-ring circus itself, with a lot of energy expended in keeping all the balls in the air and the crowd entertained.
The Madagascar series has never quite had the allure or the reputation of series like Toy Story (which the ad campaign desperately tries to compare it to) and DreamWorks’s own Shrek. Alex and company’s voyage never makes it to the heights of the best of this modern crop of kids’ movies, but it’s an agreeable, almost aggressively pleasant film. It comes out on the right side of smart. For the wary parent, Madagascar 3 is a respectable diversion for a Saturday matinee and the inevitable endless replays on home video, full of silly gags and earnest charm. Sometimes that’s enough.
Rating: 2.5 Stars
Film: Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted
Starring: Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, Jada Pinkett-Smith, David Schwimmer, Sacha Baron Cohen, Frances McDormand, and Cedric the Entertainer
Directed By: Eric Darnell, Tom McGrath, and Conrad Vernon
Written By: Eric Darnell and Noah Baumbach
Based On: Characters created by Eric Darnell
