A bungle in the jungle

The summer blockbuster season, from which there seems no escape, continues with this computer-animated DreamWorks feature about a posse of zoo animals cast adrift in Africa. It aims for the same market as Shrek, but misses its target.

There's so much farcical action going on that directors Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath would seem to have forgotten about a workable screenplay. Considering Chris Rock, Ben Stiller, David Schwimmer and Jada Pinkett Smith voice the creatures, it is a badly missed opportunity.

The plot concerns a lion (Stiller), the main attraction at Central Park Zoo, a zebra (Rock), a hippo (Pinkett Smith) and a giraffe (Schwimmer) who escape into New York, miss their train back from Grand Central Station and are packed off to the wilds of Madagascar as dangerous beasties. But it's a jungle out there.

There are some pretty sophisticated edges to this film, such as the pair of pretentious monkeys who can't read but can interpret sign language. Clever as it is, though, Madagascar spends too much time on pratfalls and slapstick and too little on subverting the idea that the lives of caged animals are worse than those in their natural habitat.

Its fearsomely energetic animation pays tribute to Chuck Jones and Tex Avery but the quartet at the centre of the tale are never given the kind of endearing characters that Disney used to create.

The result is oddly uninvolving, like a wonderful looking dish of food that tastes of nothing much. It must have taken a lot of work to cook it, too.

Madagascar
Cert: U