Penguins of Madagascar

Nov 27, 2014

Just putting this out there: "Madagascar" is an inferior movie brand, full of substandard stories and animation, the solid third movie notwithstanding. It's spotty entertainment, no real depth, middle-of-the-road celebrity voices, and is just generally dull and not terribly interesting.

So take an offshoot movie with some of the minor characters, the wannabe superspy penguins, and what do you get?

Well, hardly comedy gold, but it's a good time, certainly better than any of its predecessors (okay, maybe tying the third movie).

Based also (kinda...or at least, I think) on the cartoon series, "Penguins of Madagascar" is the the kind of movie that epitomizes my pet peeve when it comes to popular analysis of animated movies. It's cute.

Do it some time: ask an adult what they think about any animated movie. Maybe they'll say they love it or that it was really good, but press them further, and invariably a good percentage of them will say "It was...cute."

This is a gag that this movie seems in on, even establishing a token cute character (who isn't really all that cute, but whatever), whose attractiveness plays into the movie's plot.

We even get a bit of timeline wrangling, after a sly little bit that includes narration by famed (possibly insane) filmmaker Werner Herzog, where the Penguins leave a circus tent where three familiar silhouettes dance along (placing it during and after the climax of "Madagascar 3").

The movie's plot is, at best, silly and inconsequential. An octopus (voiced by John Malkovich) wants revenge on the penguins, who, in zoo after zoo, upstaged him in the eyes of zoo customers. Humiliated, he plots with his colleagues to turn all penguins from the cute, cuddly creatures we all know and love into ugly, deformed freaks of nature.

It's honesty inconsequential to the charm of this movie, which is based on a turf war between two groups of good guys: the Penguins, and the North Wind, led by Special Agent Classified (Bendict Cumberbatch). "Classified" isn't really the character's name, but the Penguins mistakenly think it is.

While it's a middling entry in the animated based-on-a-tv-show-that's-based-on-a-movie genre (is that a thing? It is now.), there is a certain charm to those Penguins, with their bumbling superspy personae, and there's certainly a silliness to the way that even in the most convoluted, impossible-to-pull-off scenarios they leap off a cliff into, everything always seems to go according to plan, even when it so totally, completely doesn't.

It's an old joke, one that Don Adams told a good 50 years ago, but here it mostly works. It's not the most memorable movie you'll ever see, but it will entertain your children(it certainly did mine), and you'll chuckle enough to leave the theater with a smile.

Film Yap

Discussion about this post