Builds on the strengths of the first film to be funny and fresh

Rating: Null/10 (8 February 2009)

The New York zoo animals have decided to conclude their time on the island and return to their home in Central Park. Along with King Julien and a few others they board a retro-fitted plane designed and built by the penguins and set off. Things are going great for a while but it is not long before they run out of fuel and drop like a stone onto a reserve in Africa. To his amazement Alex finds he has returned to his birth home and has been united with his parents while the other animals all learn what it is to be part of a tribe and outside of the confines of the zoo community however it is not long before the friends find themselves being separated.
The second Madagascar film didn't get great reviews off the critics, with it generally being met with a collective shrug with nobody having anything specifically bad to say or specifically good and, as a result I figured this would be fine on DVD rather than the cinema. I watched it last night and was pleasantly surprised to find that the film was an improvement on the first one  mainly because of lessons learnt from the first ones. I recall the first film as being significantly stronger in the side characters than in the main story and main characters and the same is true again here. The four New Yorkers are OK and they do drive the narrative which is better this time round even if it is a bit prone to moralising. One thing I did find a bit odd was a thread about how Alex could not tell Marty apart from all the different zebras  OK there was a bit of Rock joking about "we all look the same" but having it be an actual thread rather than an aside meant it did clunk around there without being refuted that much  a weird racial thing to have in the film but I digress.
The main step up in quality though has come with reducing how much running time this takes up and increasing that given to the "lesser" characters. King Julien is a scream throughout and is a welcome return and of course the monkeys and penguins easily deliver good laughs without ever being asked to carry the narrative. The humans in the jungle are a bit of a necessary evil in regards the story but don't deliver much in the way of comedy  to me the elderly women is no more than n one-off visual gag, not a character. Mostly though the film is very funny with lots of good laughs but not too many rooted in pop culture references so that it will date quickly in the way other films have  and what references it makes tend to be more "timeless" ones such as the great Twilight Zone gag. The voices are impressive in the amount of names involved. Stiller, Rock, Smith and Schwimmer all do good turns, fitting their characters pretty well but the lion's share of the gags continue to fall to Cohen, Cedric the Entertainer, Miller and a few others. The additions of Mac and Baldwin work well too.
Madagascar 2 is not a massively new creation that deserves special mention ahead of anything else good in the genre but it is certainly not a shrug of a film by any means. It builds on the strengths of the first film (the other characters) and makes a stronger and funnier sequel that is still not a brilliant thing but is definitely funny and fast paced enough to satisfy both adults and children.