I find it endearing that the Madagascar movies spend most of their time chronicling failure. In the first film, New York City zoo denizens Alex the lion (Ben Stiller), Marty the zebra (Chris Rock), Melman the giraffe (David Schwimmer) and Gloria the hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith) try to escape to Africa but wind up on the titular island instead. The picture even ended with our heroes aboard a ship waiting to return to New York, unaware that the vessel is out of fuel. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa opens with another colossal misstep. Plan B for getting to New York – concocted by the zoo penguins who were largely responsible for the fuel foul-up – is to launch an abandoned airplane from a giant slingshot made of jungle vines. They don’t quite make it to New York, but they do survive a crash landing in Africa. Plenty of laughs follow, especially courtesy of those penguins and King Julien (Sacha Baron Cohen), the lemur with a deeply deluded sense of his place in the animal kingdom.
