Fly Another Day: PENGUINS OF MADAGASCAR

Penguins of Madagascar successfully chucks everything stupid, boring, and routine about the Madagascar movies for a spinoff focusing on the best part: the penguins. In those earlier films about escaped zoo animals having a variety of wilderness adventures, the center stage went to dull neurotic creatures not cut out for jungle life. The fun happened in whatever a quartet of oblivious and absurdly confident penguins was getting up to. Scheming like a troop of superspies, complete with exaggerated karate poses and chopped Army Man voices, they bungled their way from one calamity to the next with an outsized sense of accomplishment and superiority. Of course, putting fun side characters in a movie all their own runs the risk of collapsing the charm with too much of a good thing. After a trial run in a cartoon series on Nick, here they’re in a movie that matches their loony goofiness and gives them room to stretch out. It’s a fast, often funny, very cute slapstick adventure.

In one of the first scenes, the four penguins literally rocket away from the end of Madagascar 3 into their own story. (“I was getting pretty tired of that song!” one shouts over the sounds of the previous series’ recurring “I Like to Move It” fading into the distance.) Leader Skipper (Tom McGrath), enthusiastic young Private (Christopher Knights), serious Kowalski (Chris Miller), and mute Rico (Conrad Vernon) just want to break into Fort Knox and steal one of the few remaining stockpiles of banned snack food Cheesy Dibbles. In the process, they’re pulled into a diabolical octopus’ evil plot to kidnap penguins from zoos around the world. The crazy cephalopod (John Malkovich, sounding a chummily megalomaniacal sort) is jealous that penguins get all the attention, distracting from the less adorable aquatic creatures. Fair enough, I suppose, but he’s overreacting in gleefully cartoony villainy.

So our hero birds race around the world trying to save penguins from certain doom. Every step of the way, they cross paths with The North Wind, an elite commando unit of snow-white arctic animals, a wolf (Benedict Cumberbatch, in one of his best performances, no joke), a seal (Ken Jeong), an owl (Annet Mahendru), and a polar bear (Peter Stormare). These critters are better equipped to fight supervillains. They have a plane, jet packs, tracking devices, tranquillizer darts, and a secret base in the center of an iceberg. It’s not hard to see why they’d be upset to find four bumbling amateur spy penguins doing about as well in the pursuit of stopping the octopus. The pros make perfect uptight foils for the weirdly effective nonsense the birds bring. Even better, there’s no way these penguins are learning a lesson or going through some pat character arcs. They remain blissfully themselves.

Stuffed with visual gags, rapid puns, and antic action, the movie has plenty of brisk, colorful cartoony pleasures. The scattershot globetrotting effectively collapses all sense of geography, going from New York to Venice to Madagascar to Shanghai and back again in no time at all. That’s part of the fun, high-energy whirlwind mock spy movie stuff done with waddling dim wits. Every stop is home to a manic action sequence involving a variety of animals and weapons deployed to mostly humorous effect. I liked when octopi swarmed a gondola driver and made him their puppet. That’s something you don’t see every day. Nor do you often watch a penguin punch an octopus in the face, or perform a slaphappy dance dressed in lederhosen. Sometimes, you just appreciate the novelty.

This is one of DreamWorks Animation’s most effective animal comedies, even though it arrives at a time when they’ve pivoted away from them towards animated adventures like Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon. Directors Eric Darnell (Madagascar) and Simon J. Smith (Bee Movie) make a tight and uncomplicated feature that’s over in 90 minutes and lots of fun along the way. Added strange asides include: a documentary filmmaker voiced by Werner Herzog in Encounters at the End of the World mode, a shouting man-on-the-street reporter voiced by Billy Eichner, penguins in mermaid costumes (“You mermaid my day!”), and a villain’s habit of shouting for henchmen in ways that accidentally sound like celebrity names (“Drew! Barry! More power!”). It’s an enjoyable time at the movies, quick, pleasant, energetic, funny, and modest. I’m not complaining.

Three-Ring Boredom: MADAGASCAR 3: EUROPE'S MOST WANTED

What is there to say about Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted? At this point you already know if you like this sort of thing. It’s the latest in Dreamworks Animation’s series about animals that, in the original film, went from a zoo in New York City to the wilds of Madagascar, then into deepest Africa in the sequel. Now, the group of wacky creatures (blandly voiced by Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, David Schwimmer, and Jada Pinkett Smith) is on the move again. Has there been a series of kids’ movies with a more aggressively uncharismatic ensemble of characters? I’ve never once cared about the lion, zebra, giraffe, and hippo that bumble around so dully in the protagonist roles. I couldn’t even tell you the first thing about their personalities. The lion’s vain, I guess? The giraffe’s kind of nervous quite a bit? That sounds about right. The point is, my affection for the series is awfully low. I walk in to the theater, the movie happens, and then I walk out. I don’t love them or hate them. They just are and they’re not for me. I can’t care about such generic cartoon critters.

No, all the fun characters – what few there are, that is – can be found around the margins. I like the reasonably silly penguins (funny enough to get their own spin-off cartoon series that ditches the dead weight of those lame leads) and an agreeably wacky vocal performance from Sacha Baron Cohen as a deluded lemur king. It’s with these characters that the movies threaten to break off into something altogether more enjoyable. In this movie the whole group is trying to get back to America, but have somehow ended up in Europe. They’re forced to join the circus to hide from a competently villainous new character, a seemingly indestructible French animal-control meanie, Captain DuBois (Frances McDormand in a thick, thick accent). It’s a good thing that the story clutters up with partially amusing distractions like DuBois, as well as a train full of circus critters like a gruff tiger (Bryan Cranston), a silly sea lion (Martin Short), and a nice leopard (Jessica Chastain). They’re not all that fleshed out, either, but at least the ensemble swells to take your mind off of the real leads.

The story here (cobbled together by series regular Eric Darnell and Noah Baumbach, of all people) is awfully dull and predictable, adhering to an undisguised and uncomplicated three-act structure that plods along like most low-functioning family films. It’s essentially a creaky tumble of colorful animation and wacky voices mixed in with grating pop culture references and obvious music cues. What helps it not be completely terrible is the way directors Eric Darnell, Tom McGrath, and Conrad Vernon seem to push against the plot and just make things tumble over in free-form silliness from time to time. The actual jokes fall flatter than flat, but some sequences have meager visual whimsy. All of the best scenes, and there are some good ones, could be nice, wacky shorts in a Looney Tunes style. I liked when the lemur falls in love with a bear and together they ride the bear’s tricycle through Vatican City in a romantic montage set to “Con Te Partirò.” And it’s worth a chuckle when DuBois escapes from a grimy Italian prison by hiding inside a mattress. That’s not to mention the big opening sequence in which the animals are chased around Monte Carlo in a brisk and funny slapstick chase. And there are a couple of big circus setpieces that are pleasing neon 3D swirls. But, like usual, all of these highlights are mostly secondary to the unremarkable stories of the main characters.

I suppose people like these movies or else they wouldn’t be so profitable. I’m just not one of those people. This is a series that has always felt tired to me, right from the beginning. I went to this third installment not expecting much and got a little more than I expected anyways. There are fleeting moments of smile-worthy goofiness and plenty of objects thrust out through the fourth wall to take advantage of the 3D. I guess I liked this the best out of the Madagascars, even though that’s not saying much. I still don’t care much for these characters and the movie doesn’t even try to get the unconverted there. I couldn’t care less if they made it back to New York, but as long as the movie crashed through common sense and indulged it’s silliest side-characters’ antics, I could be distracted just enough not to care that I didn’t care. The instant the credits rolled, the movie began to leave my mind. There’s nothing wrong with these Madagascar movies that better jokes, better stories, and more memorable main characters couldn’t fix.