Penguins of Madagascar

This was the last week of school (today was the last--sobs of joy from both kids and adults--so the movie I showed my kinder this week was Penguins of Madagascar. These birds were supporting characters in the Madagascar series as well as some shorts. Could they sustain a full-length feature?

Yeah, sort of. The gimmick--that these penguins fancy themselves an elite group of secret agents, and act and speak accordingly, is pretty funny. It might not be to some of the kids who have never seen a James Bond film, or The Guns of Navarone, or what have you, but there's enough silliness to please them and just enough to please adults.

We get the back story of the birds, who leave the "march," (Werner Herzog makes a great cameo as a documentarian) and set out for great adventures, first rescuing an egg that turns out to be Private, the cutest one, who also has an English accent for some reason (his favorite expression is "crikey"). Skipper is the leader, Kowalski is the brains, and Rico seems to eat anything that he can come across.

The plot here is the revenge sought by Dr. Octavius Brine, who is in reality Dave, an octopus who was shunned in the zoo after the popularity of the penguins  eclipsed his. He wants to make all penguins monstrous, and there are many gags about the cliches of the super-villain--he has a lair on a submarine, and is surrounded by hench-octopi (one of the running gags is that they have names that are coupled with words that recall celebrities, such as "Nicolas, cage them").

A subplot involves another team of secret agents from the "North Wind," led by a husky and a few other northern animals. None of these characters were very vivid, and should there be more of these films I'd drop them.

The voice cast is mostly not famous actors, especially the penguins. The only notable names are John Malkovich as the octopus and Benedict Cumberbatch, who seemingly is in every other movie, as the husky.

I sat through the film a couple of times and was not insulted, even if I was not enthralled. It's an average film that you can plunk a kid down in front of, although my sixth-graders were not rapt. Eight-year-olds I expect are the target audience.