On Tuesday night we saw the movie Madagascar. If you don't know what this movie is, you need to get out from under the rock where you've been hiding out and go to the movies. I don't mean to go see this movie, but see one. The previews for this movie have been running for something like a year.
But the for big-screen-challenged amongst y'all I will give it a quick description: a computer-animated movie, talking zoo animals with "movie star" voices, an escape from said zoo and our friendly castaways end up in the middle of nowhere Africa, namely Madagascar.
Of particular note is the quick dialog between the large escaped zoo animals and the lemur king, dialog which we've seen in the previews, where the king asks (in his Indian accent, don't ask me why) the zoo animals "where are you giants from?", the lion answers "New York" and the king yells "all hail the New York giants!"
That one gets me laughing every time. Smirking, I should say.
Unfortunately, that's the only one. The movie is supposed to be a comedy for the whole family. Well, the whole family part is kinda right but they toned down the humor a whole lot to make sure it's appropriate for the whole family. So the end result is that it's not particularly eventful, not particularly funny and not particularly worth the 10$ a piece to see. It is quite predictable and quite... I'm looking for a good word for "non-aggressive". But that's OK: it is as a proper family film should be.
The movie is entirely computer generated so it's technically considered a single big special effect. But that special effect doesn't have that "impressive" quality that validates seeing it on a big screen. The animation is quite good -- all the animal movement look very realistic -- but nothing your TV cannot handle.
So if I was to rate the movie, which is exactly what I am doing, I would give it: "2.5 / 5", "5 / 10", "better to rent it" and "I will not buy the DVD".
