Ten Stars or Less

Does anyone know anyone who works at the Central Park Zoo? If you do, can we please get the misfits who escaped, Alex the Lion (Ben Stiller), Marty the zebra (Chris Rock), Melman the giraffe (David Schwimmer), and Gloria the hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith), a plane ticket home. These guys went from a comfortable home to the jungles of Madagascar, to the deserts of Africa, and now are tearing up the streets of Europe. After linking up with a circus and introducing us to a whole group of characters we really didn’t need at this point of the franchise, these guys still haven’t made it home. Like I pointed out before, I wonder if they even want to go home. The zoo was a boring place where it was the same routine day in and day out. Out in the wild, the adventures are endless and these shenanigans test their bond that seems unbreakable. Despite finding a place where they might finally belong, I would have hoped this film was the final chapter. It may be, it may not be. I could potentially be up for another movie with these guys, but if the story doesn’t focus more on the Penguins, then I am not really interested. As Europe’s Most Wanted, the gang is on the run from Captain Chantal Dubois (Frances McDormand). Did we really need an animal hunter/officer chasing them around? There was no such character in other films, so did they run out of ideas, but wanted to create another movie? Was Dreamworks trying to keep up with the Shrek franchise by watering down the story to get more money out of us? No matter what the reasons are for this third instalment, it had a hard time living up to many other movies who make up for bad entries with strong finales. According to IMDb, there is a fourth movie in the works, who knows what these guys could be up to and will this be the time they finally make it back to the Big Apple. 4/10