Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
The first Night at the Museum movie benefited from low expectations: Ben Stiller in a kids movie with tons of effects? Greater men than him have been felled by lesser beasts. It could have been direly stupid, but instead, it was really charming fun. A sequel? They couldn’t possibly take a recipe for condescending disaster and make it work again, could they? They could and they did! Battle of the Smithsonian has a ridiculously incredibly cast of superstar faces you know and trust for solid, sensible comedy. The museum setting squeezes a little interesting factoids in there to help the kids appreciate the mash-ups of characters, and the script is just fun. It’s really fun. It’s funny.
Stiller’s character has left his museum guarding world behind for a creepy and hollowly successful career. The false cheer of the opening scenes are dreadfully sad. Soon he finds out his old nocturnambulist friends are in trouble, so he sweeps in, and after a night of mayhem and historical hilarity, well, you know. It’s a comedy and it’s first and foremost for kids, but it’s not stupid. It’s witty and a little snarky, a little dry, and there’s plenty of pure silly. Remember laughing your elementary school butt off at the kooky broad characters of Maxwell Smart, Inspector Clouseau, Mel Brooks’ movies? Remember how after you grew up, you saw all the other stuff that was funny but flew over your four-foot high head? Well, this movie is like that.
Sequels always have to be bigger than their predecessor – going from a fusty, backward Museum of Natural History diorama fetish to the museum geeks’ Caligula orgy of nerdliness that is the Smithsonian complex – ooooh. So we have wax figures and big animals, but we also art and the aeronautics museum. The National Air & Space room we pass through by day forecasts many but not all of the delights of the upcoming evening. Battle of the Smithsonian can cut right to the sunset chase and wastes little time in getting to what we’re here for.
Hank Azaria chomps the scenery in a role so perilously close to Too Much that you instinctively, pre-emptively cringe – but this man has been in character comedy for over twenty years. You’re safe with Hank. One new face in particular was Alain Chabat, a French Algerian actor I have never seen before but whose Napoleon I loved. Amy Adams redefines spunk and sexy confidence as Amelia Earhart, a woman who makes you ashamed to begrudgingly punch a time clock just to make ends meet. Still of course wisely gets out of the way of the movie and is the befudled, solution-eluding straight man to his enormous, expanded supporting cast of comedy whiz kids.
Director Shawn Levy takes the Museum helm again. Looking him up, I realized he also directed two other movies that dripped “don’t expect too much” in their previews and still somehow delivered a better time than they deserved to. Not great – but better than they should have been. Those films were Big Fat Liar and the Pink Panther remake. I know what you’re thinking. Bear with me. First, Levy knows how to compensate for a stinky script with a strong cast. Second, he doesn’t direct the script the way it was apparently written. In the cases of these two earlier movies, this is a blessing. With the Museum franchise, he has much better (but still spotty) writers Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon of Reno 911 fame. The chemistry is good with this tri0 – Levy casts and directs around any awkward script moments, and Garant and Lennon draw great characters. Win! Smithsonian wants to be frothy, but it can’t help having a little more heart and soul than you’d expect or even require. Give it a chance, it’s a fun show.
MPAA Rating PG
Release date 5/22/09
Time in minutes 105
Director Shawn Levy
Studio Twentieth-Century Fox
