The penguins are flying the plane

THERE’S a nuttier, generally more diverting entertainment creeping, crawling and waddling along the edges of Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa than the larger one lollygagging on screen.

This central story of this new animated film, written by Etan Cohen and the directors Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath, involves Alex (Ben Stiller in low gear), a lion who in 2005 journeyed from New York captivity (a zoo) to the jungle in the first Madagascar with the usual mix of celebrity-voiced racial and ethnic stereotypes.

These include a motor-mouthed zebra, Marty (Chris Rock); a nice if woefully neurotic giraffe, Melman (David Schwimmer); and the token girl, a hippo with a sizeable caboose named Gloria (Jada Pinkett Smith).

Three years later, Alex and company are literally ejected from Madagascar in a rickety plane operated by a penguin crew that’s led by the supremely confident Skipper (McGrath), a sleek ball of feathers and fat who simultaneously brings to mind Phil Hartman and John Wayne.

Along with his two sidekicks, Kowalski and Private (Chris Miller and Christopher Knights), Skipper keeps first the plane and then — after crash-landing on an African savannah — the film moving with his deadpan delivery and with some surrealistic nonsense involving a barrel of laughing monkeys.

With King Julien, a deranged lemur whose daft non-sequiturs and bon mots are dropped and dribbled with dexterity and control by Sacha Baron Cohen, the penguins and chimps could have skittered into something memorable.

Alas, the film-makers stick by the contemporary American animation playbook: Alex has a dream (gotta dance), father issues (with Bernie Mac as the pride of the pride) and a requisite baddie rival (Alec Baldwin, who else?).

Darnell and McGrath don’t appear especially committed to these stale conceits and character dynamics, which may explain why they spend so much time playing with the penguins, chimps and King Julien, who may not roar but certainly rules.

There’s true playfulness here whenever this wacky animal pack takes over, a suggestion of delirium echoed by the zippy, at times overly zooming camerawork with its roller-coaster dips and swoops.

Escape 2 Africa is good enough in patches. — NYT