Honolulu Weekly

Night at the Museum / If you’ve paid attention to the inexplicable rise of Ben Stiller’s career, you know that he utilizes one of two archetypes with his roles–either he’s the easily befuddled person out of his league (think There’s Something About Mary or Meet the Fockers), or he’s the guy who thinks he’s better than he actually is, usually accompanied with a funny accent (Zoolander, Dodgeball).

But if there’s one thing he knows, it’s how to milk a surprise success with an unending amount of ever more mediocre sequels (The third in the Fockers franchise, Little Fockers, is currently in pre-production, scheduled for release in 2011). And so, it was inevitable that the 2006 hit Night at the Museum brought about another sequel, the numerically-challenged Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, wherein Stiller plays a befuddled person who thinks he’s better than he actually is.

Battle of the Smithsonian offers exactly what you would expect out of a rushed-into-production sequel, with its more-of-the-same-only-bigger-and-louder approach, going so far as to give Robin Williams two roles, playing Teddy Roosevelt both as a bust and as a whole person, as he was shown previously. The monkey from the first film also gets another simian partner, and this time they both get to slap Stiller silly. But despite the fact that it’s a strictly by-the-numbers film, this Museum actually supplies a bit of fun.

The pilot of the second installment is easy to follow, even if you’re one of the seven people on Earth who missed the first: Stiller, reprising his role as Larry Daley, has moved on from his night watchman job at the Museum of Natural History to hock As Seen On TV-type gadgets. Meanwhile, the exhibits, which come to life at night thanks to an ancient Egyptian tablet, prepare to go into storage as they are replaced by interactive displays. Trouble ensues, however, when older characters (including Owen Wilson and Steve Coogan, who both reprise their roles here), and a new (old?) axis of evil forms between Al Capone, Ivan the Terrible and an Egyptian problem child named Kahmunrah, find themselves reanimated.

The deliverance of Smithsonian from total banality is thanks solely to its new characters, in particular Jonah Hill (Superbad) in a cameo as a self-important security guard, Hank Azaria as the gullible, flustered, lisping Egyptian king, and especially Amy Adams as Amelia Earhart. Adams has consistently put out solid, sometimes phenomenal performances, and she does so again here as a feisty, fast talking thrill-seeker. But the only surprise this CGI-fest offers is the fact that, after watching Adams in a nun’s habit in Doubt and her hazmat suit in Sunshine Cleaning, her posterior, particularly in her form-fitting flight pants, deserves to be declared a national treasure.

And then there are the inconsistent special effects, some done so well that other scenes by comparison look rushed and cheap, particularly the miniatures (can we please stop parodying scenes from 300 now?). But even those scenes are forgivable in light of other superfluous moments where you can see the hundreds of thousands of dollars and hours of work that are put into a shot that is neither interesting nor important to the plot. By the time the final battle comes about, which comes at a point you can set your watch for, one tires of the varied yet simple pop culture references and yearns for simple pleasures, such as Adams running in heels and flight pants.

Unlike an actual museum, there’s nothing to be learned here; and returning director Shawn Levy seems to forget his own dictum that being visually interesting doesn’t necessarily translate into being actually interesting. Even so, Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian manages to balance the line between being too hip for kids and too dumb for adults, and that’s a field trip that many other directors of family-friendly fare seem to have skipped out on.