Moot point

Rating: 3/10 (4 February 2009)

In a way, audiences can take comfort in the fact that pretty much at any given point in the movie, what's happening on the screen has little to do with what happened before or what's going to happen after it. Sure, Madagascar 2 has a plot, but said plot is boiled down to its bare essentials (Lion-guy returns to Africa to find out that he's the son of a king, must prove himself to his old pride, succeeds, the end) and is more of a bookmark for the various jokes and zaniness on display.
Okay, so let me start over: the only reason anyone is watching this movie is for the penguins.
Chris Rock as a zebra makes "Zebras all look alike" jokes. Ben Stiller as the lion has a birthmark in the shape of Africa and Madagascar on his paw. The hippo is fat and the hypochondriac giraffe is in love with her. That's pretty much as subtle as it gets. Which is fine, because it really comes across as some quick, cheap escapism.
The penguins, however, are funny. They banter and pun and, well, actually do stuff. Heck, Sacha Baron Cohen as the lemur king had his moments, too. It's pretty sad when the movie is stolen from all of the main characters by the characters they hardly interact with. In fact, I'd like to note that the penguins have their own shorts... two of them, in fact. So, uh, buh, duh, er... why not just make Madagascar 3 featuring, entirely, the penguins? Cut out all that other nonsense. It'd be a much better movie. (This problem is not peculiar to this specific movie. Ice Age 4 should be an epic, two-hour long Scrat fest. Nobody cares about the woolly mammoth and any of his friends already!) And as for that other little lemur chased by the shark, he pretty much set the movie overboard from mindless escapism to vacuous. This movie needed some paring down of in-jokes and more engagement with what the audience actually seems to want, judging by what actually got the laughs in the theatre I was attending.
--PolarisDiB