MADAGASCAR: ESCAPE 2 AFRICA - great fun despite the surfeit of characters

The Kid and I had a great time watching the MADAGASCAR sequel. It's a film full of loveable characters voiced by brilliant comedians. The animation is stunning - the African landscapes made me pine for Thika. The humour is character-led rather than relying on smart-ass pop-cultural references. And let's not forget those penguins, who are as good as anything from the old AIRPLANE! movies. (What else would we expect from Etan Cohen, a writer who is steeped in Hollywood satire and penned the patchy but occasionally brilliant TROPIC THUNDER).

The movie sees four New York zoo animals, stranded in Madagascar, make an attempt to fly back to New York in a battered plane piloted by penguins. The pile of junk only makes it as far as Africa, and the animals are pleasantly surprised to be back among their own kind. The hero, Alex the lion (Ben Stiller), finds his real mum and dad, but LION KING-stylee is banished by an evil lion called Makunga (Alex Baldwin). Once again, the key conflict is that Alex just wants to be an entertainer instead of being a ferocious hunter. Marty the Zebra (Chris Rock) is disturbed to find that all zebras are alike - and in a bravura racial commentary - that his friends can't tell him apart from the herd. Meanwhile Melman the Zebra (David Schwimmer) has to pluck up the courage to tell Gloria the Hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith) that he loves her - a plot line all the more piquant insofar as it shadows the Ross-Rachel plot-line from FRIENDS.

The only problem with the film is that it is, in a sense, a victim of its own success. The film-makers have created four lead characters that we care about, let alone the comic light relief in the form of the aforementioned penguins and Sacha Baron Cohen's King Julien - equally as entertaining as the main plot. So you do get the feeling that lots of different characters are fighting for attention in a serious of stories that are never given as much room to breathe as necessary.

MADAGASCAR: ESCAPE 2 AFRICA is already on release in Russia, Ukraine, Hungary, the Philippines, the US, the Czech Republic, Singapore, Slovakia, the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Israel, Egypt, Portugal, Iceland, Romania, Spain, Turkey, Belgium, France, Argentina, Chile, Germany, Mexico and the UK. It goes on release next week in Croatia, Brazil, Estonia and Venezuela. It opens on December 18th in Australia, Greece, Israel, Italy and Hong Kong. It opens in Poland on January 1st, in South Korea on January 8th and in Japan on March 14th.

Early review from Al - TRANSFORMERS

This review is by guest reviewer, Al, who can usually be found here....

I've never been a fan of TRANSFORMERS, but since the first trailer debuted couple months back I promised myself I would watch it. It comes out in Asia/Aus before anywhere else, so there haven't been any reviews to provide me anticipation of what the film would be like. Let's cut to the chase - TRANSFORMERS was just really disappointing. The special effects were predictably impressive and the larger-than-life robots left me gawking in awe like a child - but once the amazement and fascination wears out, I start wanting more Unfortunately beyond the robot huha and grandiose CGI, the movie just has little else to offer.

The biggest problem I had was with the script. Historically, one of the worst. Most of the lines/phrases are so ridiculously dumb and banal it's not even a laughing matter. You just have to witness it for yourself to truly experience the sheer nightmare that the script is. A couple of times one of the robots (usually Optimus Prime - is this misspelled Who gives a damn) launches into some preachy monologue that's so cheesy, cheap and Hallmark-ish, I feel like ripping my gums out.

Moreover, Megan Fox can't act for nuts - the whole way she was pouting with this bimbotic blank face like she was permanently stuck in a Revlon commercial. Shia LaBeouf fares a whole lot better, but once the focus shifts completely to the conflict between the two robot clans, Shia's character gradually phases out of significance and becomes ornamental (aside from having to run endlessly and protect the cube on which the fate of the planet rests on, but I can't hardly give a damn about). The final street battle scene starts off grea but quickly becomes unfocused and messy. It starts and ends repeatedly, to the point where it becomes anti-climactic and I'm just done with the damn thing. With the material, they had the potential to invent something imaginative, new and possibly groundbreaking, and it's obvious the special effects team worked their butts out to ensure things looked perfect on their part. But in the end, the mediocre, uninspired story and shit stain of a script brings the entire film down.

*Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 100% rating (although I'm sure the figure will go down as more reviews come in). What a joke.

**I know noone gives a shit, and even IMDB doesn't acknowledge this - but there's a part in Transformers that plays homage to Jet Li/Kill Bill.When Bumble Bee changes from the old Chevrolet to the new one, which is yellow and has two black stripes in the middle (the same pattern on The Bride's suit in Kill Bill Vol. 1/Jet Li's old movies), the song that comes on is the song used in Kill Bill Vol. 1 when Oren Ishii and the Crazy 88 is first introduced at the House of Blue Leaves.

TRANSFORMERS is on release in Australia, Italy, Malaysia and Singapore. It opens on July 4th weekend in New Zealand, Austria, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Norway, Russia, South Korea, Sweden, the US, Israel, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Spain and Turkey. It opens on July 20th in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico; in Belgium, France, Hong Kong, Taiwan and the UK on July 27th. It opens in Estonia, Japan, Iceland and Slovakia in August.

Bina007 adds: I was really interested to read Al's review, because like him I'd been taken by surprise at how cool the ad campaign looked. I have to say, though, that I'm not entirely surprised it sucks. Apparently, like Pirates 3, this is a movie who's release date was set BEFORE they had a cast or script. So it's another case of getting a product - any product - to justify the marketing. Does anyone else think the PR goons have taken over the asylum?

OCEAN’S TWELVE – all style, no substance

For those who didn’t see OCEAN’S ELEVEN, the movie that precedes OCEAN’S TWELVE, the set up is as follows. A bunch of thieves and con artists are gathered together by an ex-convict named Danny Ocean (George Clooney). He plans to pull of the most audacious heist of all time: robbing the vault beneath three large casinos in Vegas owned by Ocean’s nemesis, Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia). Benedict stands for the new Vegas – family entertainment, business practices more suited to an investment bank than the old skool, and ruthless efficiency. To cap it all off, he is dating Ocean’s ex-wife, Tess (Julia Roberts). By the end of OCEAN’S ELEVEN, the gang has made off Benedict’s money and his girl. It was a sweet film. Nicely done comic performances from a superb ensemble cast with genuine chemistry; beautifully slick production design; über-cool sound-track and some nice little pop-culture references. But underlying it all was a well-crafted heist-thriller with some clever and credible plot twists. In short, the flick had something for the heart and something for the head, and gave us another reason to forgive Steven Soderbergh for that horrific SOLARIS remake.

Now, OCEAN’S TWELVE is a different kettle of fish. As it opens, the gang is on the run in Europe with Benedict on their tale demanding the original money back not to mention the interest. As a result, the gang is forced to compete with the French master-criminal, The Night Fox (Vincent Cassel), to pull off three separate jobs in three separate European cities, with a gorgeous Interpol agent (Catherine Zeta Jones) shadowing their every move. So, instead of eleven criminals pulling off one heist against one enemy, we now have twelve people versus another criminal, pulling off three heists against one enemy plus one police chick as well as sundry other complications. Now, I have nothing against complex plots per se, and I had no trouble understanding what was going on. But I did feel that the movie suffered from the clutter of plot strands and characters – none of which are given time to develop and catch our interest. In the end, the movie simply collapsed into a serious of beautifully staged vignettes – good-looking people in slick clothes hanging out in nice hotels. Sort of like the cinematic equivalent of reading Condé Nast Traveller magazine. It gets worse. Around two-thirds of the way through, this movie jumps the shark with a move so self-referential and ridiculous that it undermines the credibility of the whole project. The movie doesn’t so much wink at the audience as reach out, grab your popcorn and pour it over your head. I can only hope that this ridiculous manoeuvre sinks the franchise, but I doubt it.

OCEAN’S TWELVE was released in the US and most of Europe last December, but opens in the UK today.