Shawn's Madagascar Escape 2 Africa Review

2008 Movie #144 - Madagascar Escape 2 Africa

This is such a great example of a sequel nobody fucking wanted. There seems to have been a lot of these this year. Sometimes an unneeded sequel turns out to be pretty good, but this one…this one…wow. I didn’t much care for the first Madagascar and couldn’t imagine why they would bother to make another one. Oh wait I know, because the first one made lots and lots of money. The sequel has to be one of the biggest, most blatant cash grabs I have ever fucking seen. I knew pretty much from the beginning I wouldn’t like this movie but I have to say that I flat out fucking despised it.

For the most part I don’t expect much of a plot from my animated movies. Even Kung Fu Panda, which I loved, didn’t have a whole lot of story to tell. But this one doesn’t even seem to slightly try. It touches on things we’ve seen done (and done better) 1000 times before and it really feels like the writers knew they needed some sort of a story and just slapped something together about friendship or some shit. I think some of this was even ripped right off of the Lion King. A sequel should feel like the natural progression of a story, just some fucking pile of random whatever that was thrown together for the sake of making a movie.

I could look past the lack of anything resembling a plot if at least what was going on was funny or entertaining. To go back to it, Kung Fu Panda was a great example of how to do this. Madagascar 2 doesn’t seem to have any sort of idea how to accomplish being good on any sort of level whatsoever. The humour of this movie falls flat just about constantly. It borders on embarrassing at times. Some of the jokes drag on forever, which makes it that much fucking worse. A bad joke is one thing, but when I then have to watch it drag on for 15 fucking minutes, it becomes something unholy. I mean the old lady character? She was fine in the first one for a few seconds but they really weren’t satisfied until they buried that joke into the fucking ground in this one. I can’t believe how highly they relied on it.

The animation is fine, but when compared to stuff like Walle and Kung Fu Panda, pretty damn underwhelming. I almost feel bad for the animators though because clearly a lot of effort went into making this movie, just not enough into the script or making sure it was you know, actually a good movie.

The voice acting feels like everyone is just going through the motions. As mentioned above, Sasha Baron Cohen seems to be the only person who is even trying and for the most part he does ok. Everyone else seems to be there to collect a paycheck and since the budget for this movie was around $150 million, I’m guessing those paychecks were pretty good. Hopefully their new boat or whatever was worth the price of unleashing this garbage on the world.

Like I said I never expected to hate this movie, especially as much as I did. It was a money grab that had little to no effort go into it, beside some decent animation. Skip it.

.5 / 5