Haven’t I seen this movie before?
Yes, I have seen The Wild before. It was called Madagascar, it was released last year, and it wasn’t that great to begin with.
Some animals at the New York zoo, most importantly a lion, end up needing to breakout to save a friend who has had the bad idea to leave their confines. The animals end up in the wilderness and are completely out of their element. There our lion friend must come to terms with his own inadequacies, save his buddies, and then return home to the zoo.
But this time things are different. There are no zebras in The Wild and the penguins don’t want to escape (but they do want to win their curling matches). See? Totally different.
Actually The Wild is a bit more meaningful for younger viewers than Madagascar was. Samson (Kiefer Sutherland) is a proud lion at the New York Zoo who regales his son Ryan (Greg Cipes) with tales of how his roar stopped an entire herd of wildebeests dead in their tracks when he still lived in the wild. Young Ryan can’t roar at all, though, and feels totally inadequate compared to his father. After a particularly embarrassing episode, he finds himself in a shipping container bound for Africa with his friends hot on his heels.
Assisting Samson are Benny the squirrel (James Belushi), Bridget the giraffe (Janeane Garofolo), Larry the snake (Richard Kind) and Nigel the koala bear (Eddie Izzard) (whose bad teeth attest to his English origins). Only Belushi is able to impart much of a personality into his animal, but that’s partly because he gets more screen time than the others. Larry is just dumb, and apart from calling for Captain Bligh (of The Bounty) during a bout of cabin fever, Nigel doesn’t get much character development either.
Despite my inclination to dislike heavy reliance on toilet humor, I may have to concede that The Wild is more sophisticated than many recent adult comedies like The Benchwarmers, Larry the Cable Guy and, also opening today, Scary Movie 4. While it’s certainly not great, it also isn’t terrible. The film’s lessons about defining yourself from the inside rather than from the outside are both more coherent and more commendable than I was expecting them to be.
“I’m so cuddly, I like you!” squeals the toy koala bear sold at the zoo over and over again. That pretty much says it all for most children’s movies of late (the main exception being anything made by Disney’s Pixar unit). Dreamworks gave us the rather mediocre Madagascar last year, and Disney apparently felt the need to make almost the exact same movie with The Wild, substituting hyperactivity where cuteness fails (the director is credited as Steve “Spaz” Williams). Madagascar had conspiratorial penguins. The Wild has dancing wildebeests. I’m slightly in favor of The Wild due to the better message for the children, but take your pick.
