{h( !loSIOII<5lobt MOVlc REVIEW Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted CirclJs atmosphere
By Tom R"no GIOOIIC Te.tsize iii a mI S~... 0 ~ 0 mShareThi. B Is it safe to say that a studio has officially, obnoxiously overdone a mmie's marketing when a re.iew cannot help but discuss the commercials first? Yes, the kids and I laughed (not inappropriately, hopefully) the first couple oftimes we saw Chris Rock's "Madagascar 3" ad spot v.ith Marty the 2ebra doing his circus afro shtick. For all his sociopolitical saV\Y, Rock also knows silly, and he made it work. But I wish we had kept count of how many times per day we would end up seeing the thing m'er the next se\'eral weeks. Six? Ten? Way too many, certainly, for a gag so fragilelydependent on the Gilbert Gottfried School's loud-is-funny paradigm. You can picture the DreamWorks corporate confab: "OK the kids respond to move-it. move-it repetition - gi\'e us something else repetiti\'e. and let's get herding." It wasn't just desperate. it was insulting. It also was not entirely necessary. There's some bona fide big-top wonder in this team-up betv.·een ragtag European circus critters (notably Bryan Cranston's "Breaking Bad"-broody Russian tiger) and Central Park Zoo expats Marty, Alex the lion (Ben Stiller), Melman the giraffe (Da\id Schv.immer), and Gloria the hippo Ty Burr's top 10 animated (Jada Pinkett Smith). Cascading, colorful 3-D movies perfonnance sequences are sufficiently da22ling Th. 1k>o1OO Globe m",;e critk that youll forgi\'e the bajillionth soundtrack OOOIn1«l down his"", 10 anim.1«I filmsofalltime, sampling of"Firev.·ork." There's also script material oo-written by Noah Baumbach (Stiller's Find ._nandtlleate.. "Greenberg"), seemingly a fresh choice. (Grov.ll for·Madaga.car J: E....ope·. MostWante Tom Russo 0011 be reached at tl'[email protected].•