THE MARCH OF THE VERY SILLY PENGUINS
Penguins Of Madagascar (U)
Verdict: Weird but delightful animation
Get Santa (U)
Verdict: Patchy prison-break comedy
BENEDICT Cumberbatch admitted on The Graham Norton Show recently that he can’t pronounce the word ‘penguin’, and one of the many pleasures of this wacky but joyous animated film is listening to him attempting it, and it coming out again and again as ‘penwing’.
Cumberbatch is the voice of a wolf named Classified, who runs a covert organisation called The North Wind. But the real stars of this Dreamworks film, a spin-off from the Madagascar series, are, of course, four penguins (penwings), whose arch-enemy is a geneticist named Dr Octavius Brine (John Malkovich). Except that he’s actually an octopus called Dave.
It’s remarkably silly, but stuffed with images and sequences that will delight both children and grown-ups, and a script that revels in word-play gags, a host of which work the names of movie stars into the dialogue. Thus, Dr Brine thunders to an acolyte: ‘Nicholas, cage them! And later, ‘Drew, Barry, more power!’ But nothing will sail over the heads of a younger audience more than the playful opening, in which the
celebrated German director Werner Herzog pokes fun at his own wildlife documentaries.
GET SANTA is a much patchier affair, which strains hard to be funny and whimsical and charming, but ends up mostly tiresome.
Note to film-makers, in this instance writer-director Christopher Smith: relentless flatulence whiffs mainly of desperation. In the recent, execrable Nativity 3 it was a trumping donkey, here it’s reindeer.
But Smith’s film has its modestly entertaining moments. Jim Broadbent enjoys himself as the real Father Christmas, an accident-prone cove who is sent to prison and must be sprung if the world’s children are to get their presents.
And Warwick Davis pops up as an inmate Santa mistakes for an elf, which at the screening I attended had the grown woman next to me in stitches. I can’t say fairer than that.