Describing this as the “best” of the abysmal animated “Madagascar’’ trilogy is like indicating a slight preference for being locked in a sweatbox instead of waterboarded: Either way, you feel enormous gratitude when it’s over.
What might be barely tolerable in a seven-minute short gave me the biggest headache since “Transformers: Dark of the Moon.’’
This is an exhausting, eyeball-gougingly ugly 90-minute assault of non-stop action, with an all-star voice cast shouting witless lines and a wide variety of objects lobbed at the audience in the crudest 3-D fashion.
Ben Stiller — who returns as the lead voice of a neurotic cowardly lion — recruited his “Greenberg’’ director, Noah Baumbach, to collaborate on the minimalist script, which was apparently composed on a cocktail napkin.
But don’t go expecting another “Fantastic Mr. Fox,’’ which Baumbach co-wrote with Wes Anderson.
It’s cliché central as the displaced Central Park Zoo animals — annoyingly voiced by Chris Rock, Jada Pinkett Smith and David Schwimmer — follow their monkey and penguin companions to Monte Carlo, where they hope to break the bank to finance a trip home.
This basically amounts to a feature-long chase by a fanatical French animal-control officer (Frances McDormand) — the filmmakers don’t seem to realize Monaco is a separate country — that leads all the way back to the United States.
First, though, the animals try to elude her by buying a traveling circus, allowing DreamWorks Animation to employ Bryan Cranston, Jessica Chastain and Martin Short to voice a tiger, jaguar and sea lion that are added to this motley menagerie.
“Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted’’ concludes with an interminable Central Park performance that looks suspiciously like an extended plug for distributor Paramount’s forthcoming Cirque du Soleil movie.