Ben Stiller in Night at the Museum Sequel
Second Installment of Ongoing Series Falls Flat
May 30, 2009
The first Night at the Museum film was slight but gave life to a world that most children only dream of happening in the corners of the night while they are tucked away in bed, when all their toys or the displays at museums come to life and go about their business of actually being alive.
When a story like that can be found, that is wholly implausible but entertaining and amusing nonetheless, it’s possible to meet it half way and have a little fun.
What Night at the Museum had was the conviction of a small film with nothing much to prove. The sequel, subtitled Battle of the Smithsonian has no such conviction, playing like the bigger continuation of a hugely successful franchise.
Problem is, it’s not funny or amusing in the least, and when a film stops working, even on the most rudimentary level, one compensates by filling in every empty gap in logic possible and this film is so annoyingly stupid that meeting it even a quarter of the way wouldn’t be worth the effort.
Battle at the Smithsonian
Ben Stiller reprises his role as Larry Daley who has left his position as the night guard at his small New York museum to start his own company who specialize in inventing oxymoronic devices like the key chain you can’t lose or the glow-in-the-dark flashlight.
Appearing in interviews for these worthless products is two-time heavyweight champion George Foreman who has sold over 80 million grills to date and made over 150 million dollars from it. Call the glow-in-the-dark flashlight infomercial a misguided vanity project.
Upon returning to his original museum, Larry is horrified to see all of his friends who came to life because of an ancient Egyptian tablet, are being packed up and sent away to the National Achieves below the Smithsonian and being replaced by high tech digital displays instead.
However, after the tablet is accidentally shipped to the Smithsonian, Larry receives a call from his miniature cowpoke buddy Jed (Owen Wilson) that they are under attack by the evil Egyptian Kahmunrah who wants to use the tablet to unleash his undead army.
Kahmunrah is played by Hank Azaria and is constantly undermined by a bad speech impediment, not because it has anything to do with the character itself, but because someone thought it would have been funny for the villain to talk with a lisp.
Joining Kahmunrah in quest for domination over, what, the most display space, are Napoleon, Al Capone and Ivan the Terrible who despite being played by Christopher Guest is given nothing of remote importance to do except explain that in Russia his name translates, not the way we interpret terrible, but as Ivan the Great or Ivan the Awesome.
This information plays as a joke, but why, when in reality it is an actual historical fact that the moniker Terrible was bestowed upon Ivan as a high compliment. There’s no joke here and so, as is often the case, the film closes its hand over thin air.
Too Many Displays
The problem with the Smithsonian setting is that it is too populated and director Sean Levy and his writers make the fatal mistake of assuming that to simply show an inanimate object come to life will make it instantly funny.
Unlike the first film, which found it’s humor in the way Stiller interacted with the different museum characters, this film is no more than a collection of episodes as Stiller and Amy Adams as Amelia Earhart rush from one display to the next and in and out of action sequences.
Does anyone really buy that wars between the displays could be waged inside the world’s largest museum, basically destroying the place, and not one security guard would come around for a nightly check or see something fishy on a video camera?
Most of the comedy this time comes from giving the displays funny contemporary things to say, as if to assume that this would be instantly funny. However when Cupids begin singing My Heart Will Go On from Titanic or Napoleon starts talking about college, the truth of the matter is revealed: reanimated museum displays simply cannot work as characters.
Logic fails from every angle. If they are simply displays then how have they, not only acquired the knowledge of the entire history of the person they represent, but also a firm grasp on modern pop culture? Yet some of them know they are just displays, but if they only come alive at night, how can they have any knowledge of their inanimate state during the day? This is script writing that never quite got past the clever gimmick stage.
Take Kuhmunrah who doesn’t realize he’s a display. He successfully manages to resurrect his army; an impossibility considering he is not the real Kuhmunrah (who doesn’t exist in the first place), but even then, so what? What good is an undead army if they’ll just turn back to wax in the morning, or will they, since they come from a portal to another dimension? The film is too busy making the last act play like an action sequence from The Mummy to care much about these matters.
If you think it's a grump to file these complaints against an innocent children’s movie, than fine. But the film is so largely implausible even within its own fantasy realm and so painfully unfunny that it provided nothing but time to contemplate such matters.
Verdict
So here it is: kids will enjoy this if they care more about spectacles than storytelling, but the film itself is empty, and stupid and not even that much fun as all the charm of the original is gone. There was, however, one very funny moment, during the film, in which, when Abel the astronaut monkey appears. A lady at the back of the theatre, clearly not the museum type, loudly pondered, “They sent monkeys to space? What did they do?” At least someone learned something.
