Post Nine: Madagascar

Saw Madagascar today. It sucked.

Inflicted on us by Dreamworks, who I believe was also responsible for the even-more-painful A Shark Tale, the only redeeming feature is . . . well, I suppose it looks pretty. But it is not funny. At all. There was not a moment that I broke a grin, much less a chuckle. Filled to the brim with kicks to the crotch, the movie was one giant kick to the crotch of the viewing audience, unless you happened to be under the age of five.

The movie suffered on numerous counts: first, the voices were just boring. Ben Stiller as a New York lion? Eh. David Schwimmer as a hypochondriac giraffe? Eh. Chris Rock as himself in zebra form? Eh. Whoever did the voices of the penguin? Eh. Don't know, don't care. There is simply nothing memorable about their voices: they don't do anything for the character. It's merely a case of "ooo, I know who's doing that voice!"

There is also the problem that the script just sucked: there were no funny lines. Zebra: "Grand Central Station. It's grand. And it's central." Was this supposed to be funny? Or was the fact that Chris Rock said it supposed to make us laugh? And I'm sure the movie was just chock-full of such lines. But I can't remember any of them.

As proven by The Incredibles (which in my opinion was one of the best movies of 2004, animated or otherwise), you do not have to dumb-down humor to have a good movie that appeals to all ages. Madagascar is just plain dumb.