Missing the Boat

not-so-great escape: Marty the Zebra (voiced by Chris Rock) gets in on the jailbreak.

Madagascar's haphazard back-to-Africa yarn skirts every promising opportunity.

by Sam Adams

People worry that movies are making our kids more violent, more profane, more sexual — but what if movies are making our kids less funny? The animation boom has put ostensible family fare on top of the box office — last year, Shrek 2 took in $436 million in the U.S. alone — but despite their glossy digital surfaces, many of the new animations are made with a lamentable shoddiness that borders on insult. In Madagascar, produced like the Shreks by DreamWorks, the jokes fly thick and fast, but few hit their targets. That doesn't even seem to be the point. The idea is to evoke the rat-a-tat delivery of a nightclub comic while sticking to broad, bland material unlikely to offend, or elude, anyone. Taking its cue from the faux-savvy Shreks, Madagascar is loaded with pop-culture references, but they're dated and obvious; the only movie from the last decade to make the cut is American Beauty — not surprisingly another DreamWorks product.

The movie, taken from a script by Mark Burton and Bill Frolick, starts with a solid enough premise: A group of animals in the Central Park Zoo, led by Marty, a zebra in midlife crisis, decide they've had enough of urban living and want to go back to their home continent. The back-to-Africa angle ought to lend the story resonance, especially since two of the movie's four major roles are voiced by African-American actors: Chris Rock as Marty, and Jada Pinkett Smith as the stereotypically sassy, bottom-heavy hippo Gloria. But although Marty expresses his identity crisis by wondering if he's "black with white stripes or white with black stripes," the movie's vision of Africa is as alien and exotic as a Tarzan serial.

Along with Alex the Lion (Ben Stiller), the zoo's star attraction, and hypochondriac giraffe Melman (David Schwimmer, attempting and failing to channel Woody Allen), the animals wind up on the dark continent by pure synchronicity. When Marty stages his Manhattan breakout, abetted by a quartet of tunneling penguins right out of The Great Escape (which is to say Chicken Run), the others follow suit, and after their rampage through the streets — at least that's how it looks through the eyes of uncomprehending humans, who mistake Alex's let's-all-be-reasonable gestures for sharp-toothed threats — they're shipped off to a wildlife preserve. But thanks to those meddling penguins, the shipping crates go astray, and they wash ashore on the titular island (to the strains of the Hawaii Five-0 theme — get it?). There, a bunch of nonsense transpires involving a tribe of kohl-eyed critters whose self-aggrandizing leader (voiced by Ali G's Sacha Baron Cohen) might be a parody of African dictators, as opposed to a Lion King rip-off, if the movie had so much as a clue.

With its detailed but lifeless animation and frenetic, charmless vocal performances — Rock's is so ingratiatingly mock-street it borders on minstrelsy — Madagascar is an affront from start to finish, an instantly painful experience that never improves. Won't someone please think of the children?

Madagascar Directed by Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath A DreamWorks release Opens Friday at area theaters