Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted

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This article titled “Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted – review” was written by Peter Bradshaw, for The Guardian on Thursday 18th October 2012 20.30 UTC

Here is a family movie from which absolutely nothing is expected, and yet it’s one of the week’s best releases: a muscular, potent and very funny film. It’s the animated threequel from the DreamWorks studio about those wacky animals once resident in New York’s fictional Central Park Zoo, who are now struggling to make their way back from Africa to America via, of all places, Monte Carlo. Not an obvious stopover. Ben Stiller voices Alex the lion, Chris Rock is Marty the zebra, David Schwimmer is Melman the giraffe and Jada Pinkett Smith is Gloria the hippo. Sacha Baron Cohen returns as bizarre King Julien, the ring-tailed lemur. Madagascar 3 isn’t getting the saucer-eyed notices handed out to, say, Tim Burton’s latest film. It isn’t considered as important. But to quote Kingsley Amis’s famous dictum: importance isn’t important, good writing is – or in this case, good film-making. In its unassuming and unpretentious way, this is tremendous entertainment, bursting with colour and light and energy, and a great script from Eric Darnell and Noah Baumbach. The new adventure begins when the quartet hide out in a travelling circus, dominated by an eastern European tiger called Vitaly (Bryan Cranston), who once had a bizarre act that involved jumping through an impossibly small hoop while slicked with olive oil. The whole film is very slick, and very enjoyable.

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