Hush. Shhh. The movie is about to start. “The Wild,” huh? Whoa, wait a minute, this looks familiar … haven’t I seen this before?  Well, yes, the premise and the setup, don’t they, aren’t they, uhm, a little bit like “Madagascar”?  (No, they’re a LOT like Madagascar!)  And hang on a minute, don’t these lions seem familiar? Yes again, they have almost the exact same type of relationship that Nemo and his dad have, only with fur instead of gills. 

“The Wild” is essentially the story of Samson the Lion (voiced by Keifer Sutherland) and the relationship that he has with his son Ryan (Greg Cipes). Both lions live in the New York City Zoo, where Ryan has grown up in his father’s shadow (it seems everyone knows that Samson is the most ferocious beast in captivity, while Ryan is still trying to find his own identity, and hasn’t even learned how to growl yet).  In his quest to find himself, Ryan seeks out some alone time in a shipping crate, and before he knows it, he finds himself all packaged up, being shipped to the wild. Samson and an assortment of other animals from the zoo – including Benny the Squirrel (James Belushi) and his girlfriend Bridget the Giraffe (Janeane Garofalo), Larry the dim-witted anaconda, and Nigel the Koala (Eddie Izzard) – escape from the zoo and go on a mission to rescue young Ryan. And they get into all sorts of mischief and mayhem along the way. 

OK, so “The Wild” is the lion-version of the “Nemo” characters, doing the story of “Madagascar.”  What’s wrong with that? Weren’t those both pretty good movies?

Well yes, they were. But the father-son relationship in Nemo was much more fully developed and more sincere than was that relationship in “The Wild”. And the story in Madagascar was better told than it was in The Wild.  

I did find the character of Ryan to be appealing, a young lion cub with a sort of pre-teen angst. He was drawn to be like a cute little lion-cat, and I found him to be a sympathetic character. And while most of the humor in the movie was of the slapstick-trip-over-rock-and-hit-head-on-tree variety (which I didn’t find even remotely funny), there were in fact a couple really hysterical elements to it. I thought that nearly every scene that involved Nigel the Koala was funny, and I thought Eddie Izzard did a fantastic job with that character.

But here’s the thing … the likely reason that you are going to the theater to see “The Wild” is because you have kids. And if you have kids, you have probably already seen both Nemo and Madagascar countless times, and don’t need a second-rate derivative of it.  And then along comes The Wild, and it’s just more of the same, only a bit more stale.  Look, I didn’t think this movie was horrible at all, it just wasn’t particularly good. And it invited comparisons to two very good movies, and suffered in those comparisons.