![]() Just like Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian itself.įor most of its length, the grim, tedious, and abjectly humorless (and colon-less) Terminator Salvation clunks along with professional skill and not an ounce of personality. They're also endearing and frequently funny as all-get-out. All this, plus the Jonas Brothers as a trio of flying, crooning marble cherubs whom Stiller chastises for being "a little pitchy." They are. A sequence that animates Smithsonian paintings provides some of the blissful enjoyment of Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo - Levy frames the gags so you catch the best ones from the corner of your eye - and while Robin Williams, Owen Wilson, Steve Coogan, and the splendidly dyspeptic Ricky Gervais all return, it's the series newcomers who offer the biggest laughs: Hank Azaria is riotous as a cranky Egyptian ruler with a speech impediment (stretching the Ghostbusters II analogy further, he's this film's Peter MacNicol), Jonah Hill delivers a brief, brilliant turn as an prickly security guard, and Amy Adams, with Katharine Hepburn-inspired patrician cadences, is a divinely sensible, butt-kicking Amelia Earhart. Yet for all of its failings, there's so much here that's ticklishly inventive that you leave feeling recharged and alert - and, surprisingly, not dreading Night at the Museum 3. We know the plot is drivel, too, Ben, but couldn't you at least have tried to appear engaged? And while Stiller's sardonic, nattering, vaguely hostile readings are still a refreshing rejoinder to the family-oriented blandness, his deliveries and expressions here are so deadpan that nothing much seems to be at stake. ![]() Several of the movie's talented comedians, particularly the great Christopher Guest, are given almost nothing amusing to do. After watching beleaguered pop Ben Stiller learn to be a better dad in the 2006 original - which, like its sequel, finds museum exhibits magically bursting to life through the aid of a supernatural thingamajiggy - it feels repetitive, to say nothing of maudlin, to watch him now learning to be a better friend, and the final reels digress into one of those over-extended, hyper-active action climaxes that makes the young uns giggle while their parents stare at the exit signs. There are times, in truth, when the film is a load of something else. ![]() The movie is scrappy, silly, and a load of fun. Despite its titular locale, no one is going to mistake director Shawn Levy's adventure comedy for a work of art, yet when this follow-up is really working - which is surprisingly often - it provides a giddy, giggly rush, and it's filled with comic bits that you could probably watch three or four times in succession and laugh at every single time. Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian is to its precursor what Ghostbusters II is to Ghostbusters: the less-novel offering, sure, but a follow-up of surprising wit and great throwaway touches, and one that, in many ways, improves on source material that was pretty terrific to begin with. NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM: BATTLE OF THE SMITHSONIAN
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