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Review:
 In
the jungle, lions eat zebras. They don't eat hippos because even
the wimpiest hippos can beat the crap out of any lion. But this is
the Central Park Zoo in the heart of New York City, and Alex(Ben
Stiller) is a lion that gets his meat from the supermarket and
doesn't know from hunting on the velt.
Thus, his best friend is a zebra named Marty(Chris Rock), who's
having his tenth birthday this day. Marty likes life in the zoo
okay, but he's dreamed of life in the wild, something Alex and
other buddies Melman the Giraffe(David Schwimmer) and Gloria the
hippo(Jada Pinkett Smith) aren't too keen on either. At this point
we've got a funny animal version of “Seinfeld” and on that level
it works great. The chimps are very droll and there's a pack of
penguins executing a prison break.
This part is really very funny.
Then Marty decides to spend the rest of the evening in the
wilds of Connecticut, and his three friends head south on the
Lexington Avenue line to stop this nonsense and get him back home.
Now even in New York, where everybody's seen everything, the sight
of four mega fauna in Grand Central is a little much.
So far, so good.
But had they gone back to the zoo and done something else like
that it would have been a fun romp, but the film's called
Madagascar and we have to get to that island somehow….so the
animal rights people force the zoo to send them back to Africa,
which is something that our heroes neither want nor need.
Once they get there, the thing begins to fall apart….but not
immediately, thank goodness. First they enter the kingdom of the
lemurs, ruled by King Julien XIII(Sacha Baron Cohen)and his major
domo Maurice(Cedric the Entertainer), who like funky dancing and
are afraid of the dreaded fossa, and decided that since Alex is a
lion, he could be used to keep the fossa away.
Unfortunately, Alex's instincts kick in, and the whole thing
turns to crap. We've got about two thirds of a brilliant movie
here. The animation is wonderful, the dialogue even better and the
characters are endearing. It's a real pity that when thinking
about carnivores that they have to look at it from a vegetarian
point of view. It's something that can kill a film, as it almost
does here.
But it's still very good for the most part and is worth a look.
Eric Lurio
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