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.

Random DVD round-up 4 - WELCOME HOME ROSCOE JENKINS

Malcolm D Lee may be kin to Spike Lee but he produces movies that are diametrically opposed to his cousin. Spike Lee joints are politically engaged, technically accomplished and audacious - sometimes to their detriment. Malcolm D Lee, by contrast, produces disposable commercial movies devoid of artistic vision. WELCOME HOME ROSCOE JENKINS is just such a movie. The story is pure romantic-comedy formula - nice guy (Martin Lawrence) with bitch-girlfriend does mean things to alienate warm-hearted friends before epiphany leads to apology, dumping bitch and dating childhood sweetheart. It's all very glossy and slips by easily enough, that is until you start choking on the crude racial stereotypes, blatant class-politics and generally stale contents. According to this movie, African-Americans are either assimilationist, materialistic sell-outs or obese, violent hicks. Formualaic plotting and racial stereotyping could be forgiven if this movie were actually funny. But it's not.

WELCOME HOME ROSCOE JENKINS opened in the US, France, Turkey, Egypt and UK in Spring 2008 and is now available on DVD.

STREET KINGS - once a patsy....

STREET KINGS is a dull, predictable, mis-cast, dirty-cop-thriller from the director of HARSH TIMES and writer of TRAINING DAY. The movie features Keanu Reeves as a meat-head, bent-out-of-shape, vigilante cop. Forest Whitaker is the corrupt police chief pulling his strings. The Reeves character has an attack of morality and goes after the gang-land killers of another cop who was actually snitching on him. It's a cute little Catch 22 situation. If he finds the killers, they could implicate him (wrongly, for once) in the hit. Should he take the fall but do the right thing? In a town so corrupt, what's the right thing anyways?

After LA CONFIDENTIAL and TRAINING DAY, I need to see something pretty special from a dirty cop film to justify its existence, and this film just doesn't have it. The script is derivative, paced too slow, and the plot twists will be obvious to anyone familiar with the genre. The casting is an even bigger problem. Keanu Reeves is plain unconvincing as a grizzled, hard-as-nails cop. He's about as hard as my grandmother. Hugh Laurie is similarly unconvincing as a foul-mouthed, intimidating Internal Affairs cop. Forest Whitaker hams it up as the Chief - it's like watching one of those grim Al Pacino performances where he randomly shouts things and pastiches himself. In fact, pretty much the only actors who do a good job are two young, relatively inexperienced cast members - Naomie Harris as a grieving widow and Chris Evans as a rookie cop.

STREET KINGS is on release in the Philippines, Singapore, Estonia, Finland, Indonesia, Turkey, USA, Oman, Germany, Greece, Hungary, the Netherlands, Russia, South Korea, Taiwan and the UK. It opens next week in Argentina, Denmark, Iceland, Spain and Sweden and the following week in Norway. It opens in May in Belgium, Hong Kong and in June in Australia, France, Italy and Poland.