[Movie 296 / Day 313]
Ben Stiller’s latest comedy offering on DVD and bluray sees him reprising his role as Larry Daley, night watchman at New York’s Museum of Natural History. In this lacklustre sequel however, a couple of years have passed and Daley is now a successful entrepreneur/inventor, owner of his own company and king of the shopping channels. He still pops in on his old mates at the museum to see how they’re getting on, but his visits are becoming less and less frequent.
At the start of the movie, he pops back for one of these visits and a doleful Teddy Roosevelt (Robin Williams) tells him that the majority of the exhibits are being shipped off to Washington DC to be put into storage in the Smithsonian archives – possibly never to be taken out again. Alas, Pharaoh Ahkmenrah is staying in New York – along with the ancient tablet that brings the exhibits to life.
That is, the tablet is supposed to stay in New York, but naughty monkey, Dexter, has stolen it and has taken it with him to the Smithsonian bringing everything there to life – including Ahkmenrah’s evil older brother, Pharaoh Kahmunrah (Hank Azaria, sporting a magnificently eccentric accent) who has come back to life and is desperate to reclaim the tablet in order to open a portal to the underworld, amass an army and… Well, it’s a fairly standard ‘evil-take-over-world’ plot.
A couple of twists have Larry in possession of the tablet and Kahmunrah chasing him, having recruited evil henchmen in the forms of Ivan the Terrible, Al Capone and Napoleon Bonaparte. We’re soon introduced to some of the new characters, including a giant octopus/squid; General Custer, who is captured very early on and spends most of the movie trying to formulate a winning strategy with the New York exhibits; and Amelia Earhart, the very cute Amy Adams, who spends the entire movie wearing tight trousers and calling Larry ‘Ace’ – the joke wears thin, fairly quickly – and who is thrilled by the prospect of an adventure.
There are lots of flaws to the movie, not least that it’s lost a lot of the original’s charm (and let’s not forget, the original wasn’t that great). There is no more wide-eyed amazement from Larry as he witnesses the museum coming to life. There are no little tasks he needs to complete to keep the exhibits happy. There’s just a clunking great ‘stop the bad guy’ plot with loads of special effects shoe-horned in. It’s the kind of plot that appears all-too-often, a safe background that gives Stiller an excuse to run around meeting lots of new characters. Compounding the plot-by-numbers, some of the original cast are woefully underused – poor old Owen Wilson’s miniature Jebediah is either stuck in a box or stuck in an hourglass. Steve Coogan’s Octavius fares even worse, being sent off on a wild goose chase before reappearing on the back of a squirrel, of all things. The camaraderie between those two was one of the good bits of the first movie, but it barely makes an appearance in this.
The kids seemed to enjoy it, but as a family movie, it barely scrapes above average – in fact, I can only think of one scene that I really dug; that’s a scene where in trying to escape from Kahmunrah’s soldiers, Larry and Amelia Earhart (a dashing Amy Adams) dive into Robert Doisneau’s famous photo, Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville and discover the black and white Parisian boulevard beyond the photographs borders. They even rope in some passers by to help them thwart the Egyptian soldiers and inadvertently change the course of history. OK, that last bit was on the stupid side, unless we’re expected to believe that the photograph acted as a time-machine.
There are better family movies out there, but to be fair, there really haven’t been that many released recently, so if you’re looking for something to watch with your kids, you might have to put up with this. Unless your kids are old enough to enjoy CORALINE, in which case rent/buy that instead.
NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM: BATTLE OF THE SMITHSONIAN is available now to buy on DVD and bluray, from your usual supplier. If that’s Amazon, why don’t you help support M365D and use this link to buy it?
Rating: 
[ IMDB rating: 6.0 / 10 | IMDB link | Running time: 105 mins ]