Directed by Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath

Rated PG

(Two and a half stars)

"Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa" opens with the back-story of Alex the lion (voiced by Ben Stiller). Baby Alex wanders away from his father Zuba (Bernie Mac), and is captured by hunters. Zuba sets out in a desperate chase but he can't rescue his son. It's a touching bit of storytelling and the last piece of well-crafted narrative we're going to see in this film. But between you and me, we're not going to miss it.

"Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa" doesn't draw us into a compelling story, instead it plops us down in the middle of a vaudeville act. This is slapstick humor in the best sense of the word.

That doesn't mean there isn't a plotline in this movie. Alex and his buddies Gloria the hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith), Marty the Zebra (Chris Rock) and Melman the hypochondriac giraffe (David Schwimmer) decide to leave Madagascar and return to New York City. They make the fateful decision to travel in an old plane piloted by those wonderfully crazed penguins from the previous films. It's fairly certain from the nail-biting takeoff that the odds are against them making it all the way home. Sure enough they end up crash landing in the very same African wildlife reserve that baby Alex was kidnapped from.

This unexpected homecoming leads to all sorts of adventures: Alex reunites with his parents, Marty goes through an identity crisis in a herd of zebras that look like photocopies of himself, and Melman has to decide whether he is going to finally admit to the torch he carries for Gloria. The plot is a daisy chain of clich