Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa - 7.5/10
Okay, was the first movie just a teaser trailer for this one
or something? All the things I said I wanted more of the first time – that’s
what this movie is. We get a deeper story, we get more into the characters,
there’s a fully realized plot, yadda yadda yadda. Still, all things considered
it’s only slightly better than the first one.
To start, I have seen the opening of this before. Just the
first ten minutes or so when they’re preparing to launch the plane to leave
Madagascar. Maybe I got that mixed up with the first one which is why I was
expecting more; I don’t know. Other than that though, this was all new to me.
We start with a nice little back story on Alex the lion and
how he came to be in New York. This is an obvious set-up for later when he is
reunited with his parents in a game preserve in Africa, but it’s a neat little
origin story, and also helps establish that Alex has always been a bit of a
showman and not much of a “real” lion. More on that later.
The other three characters are kind of shunted to the side
in favor of Alex; they do have their own stories, but they’re B plots at best
and there isn’t much detail. Marty the zebra finds that he is exactly like
every other zebra right down to personality, voice and speech pattern. Gloria
the hippo tries to find a mate only to be disappointed when he turns out to be
a little shallow, and Melman the giraffe is in love with Gloria the hippo.
Yeah, what? I know these characters are supposed to be human-like to a degree
and that’s part of the joke, but that one just didn’t work for me.
As before, the best parts of the movie involve the lemur
King Julien (Sacha Baron Cohen), and the squadron of psychotic penguins. It is
the penguins who fix and operate the plane, steal technology from the humans,
and pretty much run shit. Their interactions are hilarious and they are
definitely out of their minds. When a warning light in the plane goes off, they
determine the problem is “some kind of flashing, incandescent colored light,
most likely to indicate a malfunction of some sort.” The skipper calls for the
plane’s manual, which he uses to smash the light and declares the problem is
solved. They also have a labor dispute with monkeys.
If the penguins are crazy, King Julien is absolutely off-the-charts
insane. Everything that comes out of his mouth is hysterical, and at one point
I actually had to rewind a bit since I was laughing so hard I missed some
stuff. To be fair, I was taking pain medication at the time, but even now in
retrospect it was still really funny.
There were a few things that dragged the movie down. The
friends have a falling out and a “Who needs you?” moment where they walk away
from each other and whatnot, and I kept thinking, “Didn’t we go through all
this in the last movie? I thought they were past this shit by now.” Also, the
gag with the little old lady who beats them up was a little overplayed, even if
it did tie into the plot at times.
Most of the new voices did a good job, but I can’t decide if
Alec Baldwin was a good choice for the villain or not. He gave a decent
performance, but after about five minutes I was like, “Holy crap, that’s Alec
Baldwin!” and that was all I could see or hear for the rest of the movie. And
finally, there was the main story itself. Mostly it worked: Alex is returned to
his pride, he doesn’t know how to be a lion, he’s forced to leave, but in the
end his unorthodox way of doing things saves everyone. Hooray!
I have no complaints regarding the formula itself, but there
was one instance of miscommunication that really bothered me. There’s a rite of
passage all lions go through that Alex volunteers for, thinking it will be some
kind of dance-off (for whatever reason). Of course it’s actually a fight, and
of course he loses horribly, and we get the whole “not a real lion” thing,
complete with paternal disappointment. Thing is – and Alex totally calls his
dad out on this – no one bothered to actually tell him what this rite of
passage was. They just assumed he knew. Now, Alex’s assumption was just as
foolish, but he at least attempted to clarify. A bit. I’m not letting him off
the hook completely, because the logical thing to do for someone in his
position would have been to go straight to his father and say, “Dad? About this
thousand-year-old tradition I’m taking part in tomorrow? What exactly do I have to do? Please be as
specific as possible.” The whole thing was a contrived misunderstanding for the
sake of drama and I’ve never really been a fan of those.
What it all boils down to was this: a bit more fleshed out
than the first movie but less focus on all but one of the main characters, a
decent story with good background and set-up, one gag that was overused and
plenty of others that weren’t, only one bad plot device, and hilarious side
characters. Not a great movie, but a good one.
The need to make a movie solely about the penguins. I’d
watch the hell out of that.
Oh wait, they are! I hope King Julien is in it.
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