Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted (2012)

In terms of memorable animated characters and a viable franchise to rival something the Disney studio might produce, perhaps Dreamworks came the closest with its attention deficit-addled band of homesick zoo animals from the Madagascar films. Huge moneymakers all, the franchise taught my children to "move it, move it" and that it's okay to love someone who isn't thin ("I like 'em big, I like 'em chunky"). And now, thanks to the third installment, my son is obsessed with afros. Who knew something so corporate and mainstream could be so oddly counter-cultural?

The mayhem began in 2005 with "Madagascar," in which a core group of zoo animals from New York City who dream of something more break out of the zoo and end up in crates, transported to the titular country. Then, in 2008, Alex the lion (Ben Stiller), Marty the zebra (Chris Rock), Melman the giraffe (David Schwimmer) and Gloria the hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith) tried to head home and instead ended up in Africa in "Madagascar: Escape 2  Africa." While the original film gave us adversaries via a delightfully shifty band of penguins, the sequel is notable for the addition of King Julien, Sasha Baron Cohen's insane lemur with a 90s pop music obsession.

And here we are now with "Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted," which picks up right where part two leaves off as the penguins have rigged a plane to leave Africa and head back to the states but have, big shocker, decided to leave their fellow zoo animals behind. Thus, part three is the "going home" installment of the film, but before the more bohemian adults out there start to panic about a film who's message is "entrapment in a zoo cage is a perfectly wonderful existence for a large wild animal from the African savannah," know that the majority of this film focuses on one significant detour en route back to the States: the circus. Yes, friends, that's right. The only institution that treats exotic animals even more poorly than a zoo becomes the vehicle through which Alex and company attempt to work their way back the Central Park Zoo.

In this third installment, the character of Marty really pulls front and center, though via a subplot of mildly comic and gentle racial stereotyping, it's so that the black guy can sing about afros. Yes, it turns out that Marty is tickled polka-dot about being involved in a circus, though his compatriots are apprehensive. And who wouldn't be? This circus is bizarre in that it is entirely animal-run, a convenient plot point for those concerned about the way people mistreat circus animals. (Another attempt to PC this plot element is the conspicuous absence of elephants, perhaps the very symbol of three-ring abuse tactics.) No, in this circus, the animal abuse is self-inflicted and relegated mainly to a Dostoyevskian Bengal tiger named Vitaly, whose glorious past was made famous by his lubing himself with olive oil and diving through hoops of decreasing size, his great career all but ending when the hoops got to be the size of wedding rings and he asked to have them set on fire.

Most of the new characters - the zoo crew - are voiced in such a way that their celebrity vocalists are all-but-unrecognizable: the thick Russian accent of Vitaly coming from Bryan Cranston, the gentle purr of a hot jaguar coming from Jessica Chastain. But two of the new characters elevate "Madagascar 3" to new heights, making it perhaps my favorite of the franchise.

The first is Captain Chantel DuBois, a cunning and rubbery officer of Monte Carlo's animal control who will go to Inspector Javer-like lengths and beyond to apprehend our gang, a place for Alex's head prepped and ready on her office wall. DuBois is voiced by Frances McDormand, a fact that almost arrives as a pleasant surprise when the credits roll, thanks to her thickly comic French accent. DuBois is one of the funniest villains I've seen in an animated film in quite some time. She's as menacing as a cartoon villain needs to be but nowhere near as scary for kids because of the way this film puts her through breakneck-paced action sequences.

The other great new character, oddly enough, is a circus bear. The bear looks and acts like a real bear, not a cartoon one, and Julien ridiculously and inexplicably falls in love with her. And you'll be shocked at how that silly subplot ends up giving the film some of its only moments of poignancy or heart.

In many ways, "Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted" defies criticism in that it's designed to entertain the kids for 80-some minutes and does nothing short of that. It's so frantically paced that the film feels like it's over in far less than that amount of time, and where its filmmakers clearly demonstrate a lack of understanding of how to vary a film's pace, they certainly get comic timing, as the film is frequently and regularly entertaining enough to make adults laugh as much as the kids do.

I did not see this film in 3-D; you really have to convince me to spend that extra money on a format I rarely see as successfully enhancing a film. But from other reviews I've read, the 3-D option of this film is actually worth the extra dollars, and I'm sure that a climactic Cirque du Soleil sequence near the end of the film is where that 3-D earns itself.

There's been a lot of talk in the press that this third installment of Madagascar is the greatest of the three films. I guess I could agree to that, though to me, all three films are at about the same level of quality. I wouldn't say that "Europe's Most Wanted" is in any way some kind of breakthrough or improvement from either of its predecessors. But I will say that it kept my kids out of the hot sun in a cool theatre for a little bit, and it kept their attention that whole time. And unlike some of the other movies my kids drag me to, this one was decidedly painless, whether I'll remember it or not.

3.0 out of 4