Awful

Rating: 1/10 (15 July 2005)

I tend to go one of two ways, with the endless crop of animated films we get each year: either loving them or hating them. But even by the standards of the ones I've previously disliked Madagascar was truly awful. So much so, I cannot think of a single redeeming quality it had to offer anyone over the age of three.
The initial scenes in the zoo offered a possibility of a slightly interesting concept but from the second the plot veered towards finding the wild via Connecticut (another instance of where we're all supposed to know the location of a minor U.S state despite living 4,000 miles away) what plot there was, was painful.
This was the first animated film I've seen that did not further the genre one iota. The characters had nothing about them to like, did not develop in the slightest throughout the film. The film got stuck in a real mess for the middle 30 minutes or so and was nothing more than filler. The characters in the wild couldn't hold any interest at all, the central animals seemed to alter their personalities at will with once Alex & Marty - I had to check those names as they was amazingly forgettable - going from loving to hating each other during one snippet of Chariots of Fire on the beach. Giraffes have never worked in any concept least of all a film like this. Most of the intended laughs here were presumably through the smut.
But the biggest problem Madagascar had was trying to work out where the laughs were. I've no idea, I never came close to even a snigger. What few grunts there were in my cinema were from the usual sources: attempts at disco dancing, falling over, things hitting them on the head or crashing into trees. As I said, nothing that hasn't been flogged to death a million times before and it must have taken all of three seconds to come up with the entire list of jokes in this.
I'm sorry, but as many critics here have said, this is by some margin the worst film of this genre you will see in a long time, and I cannot think of one thing it offers anyone of any age. The writers need to watch Toy Story or Chicken Run to see how you write a film to appeal to all ages, even children.