BackFilm Review: Penguins Of Madagascar
A laugh-a-minute riot with New York's finest flightless birds
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Fans of the Madagascar franchise know fully well that the motley crew of talking zoo animals would never have broken out of their cushy enclosures at Central Park if it wasn’t for the smarter-than-your-average posse of penguins.
In the film series, Skipper (Tom McGrath), Kowalski (Chris Miller), Rico (Conrad Vernon) and Private (Christopher Knights) played tour operators, ferrying their clueless clique across continents by hijacking cargo ships, commercial airliners, circus trains, police cars and safari Jeeps. As breakout stars in DreamWorks Animation’s lucrative spin-off, the flightless foursome ditches the mammals to take off on an unsupervised, round-the-world adventure.
Penguins Of Madagascar begins with a quick backstory—as chicks in Antarctica, the quartet was deviously kicked off the edge of a glacier by a documentary film crew, that of German film-maker Werner Herzog no less.
Cut to the present, picking up from where Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted ended, and the penguins have had enough of touring the US with their circus family. They break into Fort Knox in Kentucky, Mission: Impossible style, only to be kidnapped by Dr Octavius Brine, a giant evil genius octopus, also known as Dave (John Malkovich). It turns out that Dave has been overshadowed by penguins at aquariums the world over.
To seek revenge, he has concocted a green gloop called Medusa Serum that rids penguins of their cuteness and cuddliness, much like Despicable Me 2’s PX-41 potion that turned the sunshine-yellow minions into savage, purple-coloured freaks.
The penguins, of course, have no trouble escaping from the clutches of the mad scientist’s headquarters in Venice. But during an incredible high-speed gondola chase, The North Wind, an “elite, undercover, inter-species task force" intercepts to save the birds anyway. The plot quickly turns into a competition—to save penguin-kind—between Team South Pole, led by scatter-brained big brother Skipper, and Team North Pole, consisting of a polar bear, a snowy owl and a harp seal, led by a swashbuckling wolf called Classified, voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch.
The penguins’ unflinching and relentless do-and-let’s-see-if-we-come-out-alive spirit lends itself to plenty of slapstick antics and countless unfunny puns that manage to force a chuckle or two, but the birds themselves aren’t nearly as witty as they were in the original Madagascar series. Still, the laugh-a-minute riot leaves little room for any kind of on-site evaluation and packs in punches, big and small, for fans of all sizes.
Penguins Of Madagascar released in theatres on Friday.
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