Between a Whinny & a Roar

You can take Ben Stiller out of the city, but you can’t take the city out of Ben Stiller. He’s uptight. He’s angry. He’s a touch defensive. It’s a shtick Mr. Stiller has perfected in a numbing litany of recent comedies. If you’ve been within 100 yards of a multiplex in the past few years, you’re probably familiar with it.In “Madagascar” Mr. Stiller actually begins on a fresh note. A successful Manhattan professional, he is confident, charming, and above all happy with his life. Sadly, his good humor is short-lived. Early in the film he’s expelled from the Big Apple, and soon after he begins to exhibit his usual stress and irritation, this time with an edge of bloodthirstiness.Did I mention he’s a lion?In DreamWorks’s latest animated feature, Mr. Stiller plays Alex, the pride of the Central Park Zoo, a feline celebrity with more merchandising deals than George Lucas. When we first meet him, he is offering a snow globe with his likeness to his best friend, a zebra named Marty (Chris Rock). It’s Marty’s 10th birthday, and he’s starting to feel a little fenced in. “Another year’s come and gone and I’m still doing the same thing,” he complains. When a group of conspiratorial penguins intent on tunneling to Antarctica accidentally emerges in Marty’s pen, the zebra begins to get ideas. Perhaps a quick jaunt to Connecticut?Soon enough Marty sneaks out of the zoo and begins hoofing his way down Fifth Avenue to Grand Central Station. When his friends – Alex, Melman the Giraffe (David Schwimmer), and Gloria the Hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith) – discover his empty pen, they hurry to intercept him. What transpires next is pretty much what you’d expect if a passel of zoo escapees suddenly showed up at a Metro-North ticket window: Our heroes are tranquilized, crated up, and put on a boat headed for – well, it doesn’t really matter, because the nefarious penguins hijack the ship en route, inadvertently dumping Alex, Marty, Melman, and Gloria overboard in the process.They wash ashore on Madagascar, an island of lush forests, glittering beaches, and lemur house parties. What this tropical paradise lacks, however, is steak – at least the kind that comes pre-sliced. Alex, who has an erotic attachment to his T-bones and porterhouses, soon begins having uncontrollable cravings, and in no time he’s gone all Jack Torrance at the Overlook Hotel, ready to red-rum his buddy Marty for a taste of that zebra filet. A few close calls follow, as Alex repeatedly implants his teeth into his friend’s butt. But in the end friendship and a low-fat diet prevail, as Alex proves his Manhattan bona fides by deciding he prefers sushi to sirloin after all.Like DreamWorks’s previous big animated offerings (the “Shrek” movies and “Shark Tale”), “Madagascar” is crammed with inside jokes, featuring references to everything from “American Beauty” to “Planet of the Apes” to “Dr. No.” At one point, the soundtrack satirically offers the themes from “Hawaii Five-O” and “Chariots of Fire” mere seconds apart. But “Madagascar” never quite succumbs to the ironic oversaturation of the “Shrek” franchise, maintaining a core of sweetness amid its clutter of comic allusions.Unfortunately, the film doesn’t really seem to know where it’s going, apart from the land mass of its title. The early Central Park scenes do little more than introduce the characters and set up a generation of young zoo-goers for disappointment when they discover that lions do not typically perform on a pedestal in the midst of the crowd and that zebras almost never spit water into the audience. The humor is a little cruder than usual, including jokes about underwear, rectal thermometers, armpit farts, and the proper response to a speaking engagement by Tom Wolfe.The whole enterprise feels a little slack, as if 40 minutes worth of material has been stretched to fill 86. As often as not, the filmmakers plug the gaps by resorting to a level of slapstick perhaps better suited to Saturday morning television. The animation, too, has a somewhat cartoonish quality, with even the furry animals seeming a bit smooth and plastic.The movie picks up somewhat when the gang arrives in Madagascar, thanks in no small part to the talents of Sacha Baron Cohen, the trickster behind “Da Ali G Show.” Mr. Cohen provides the voice of Julian, the self-described “lord of the lemurs” and easily the most entertaining small mammal to grace the screen since Nathan Lane’s meerkat in “The Lion King.” The accent Mr. Cohen has devised for Julian is one never before heard on this planet, something like Bobcat Goldthwait trying to speak Bulgarian with a mouthful of gum. Julian doesn’t have much to do in the movie – really, none of the characters do – but the mere sound of his voice is enough to enliven otherwise forgettable dialogue.Also notable are the penguins (their eventual arrival in Antarctica is one of the movie’s high points), with Andy Richter giving their leader, Mort, a nice paranoid edge. By contrast the headliners – Messrs. Stiller, Rock, Schwimmer, and Ms. Pinkett Smith – while all perfectly adequate, are not particularly memorable. As with past DreamWorks stars, they seem to have been hired as much for their names as their performances.It all adds up to a middling entry in the animated sweepstakes, better than “Shark Tale” or Fox’s “Robots” but not up to the lofty standards that Pixar keeps setting. Somewhere, in other words, between a whinny and a roar.

Between a Whinny & a Roar

Between a Whinny & a Roar

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