Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian

My review for 2006's Night at the Museum ended by saying, "With just a little bit more magic and awe added to the proceedings, it could have been something really special". Battle of the Smithsonian needs more than just a little bit of magic and awe. It needs a complete top-to-bottom overhaul, starting with a script rewrite from Page 1. This is as crass, bloated, and soulless a summer blockbuster as I have ever seen, and it seems the only thought that returning director Shawn Levy put into it was how much chaos could be fit into a single shot.

The movie is chaos, plain and simple. It takes a loose plot and a potentially bright and talented cast, then pretty much orders them to run around screaming, not really doing anything for 105 minutes straight. The talent that is ignored here is enormous. We've got Ben Stiller, the luminous Amy Adams (the only one in the cast who seems to be trying), Robin Williams, Owen Wilson, Ricky Gervais, Bill Hader, Christopher Guest, Steve Coogan, Eugene Levy...Even Darth Vader and Oscar the Grouch make cameos. (And yes, I refuse to look up the names of the actors playing these childhood icons, and prefer to believe they're making cameos by themselves.) All these actors are victims of a screenplay by Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon that simply doesn't care. It has no wonder, and absolutely no sense of what is going on within it. This is the kind of movie that asks what would happen if the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. came to life, and it can't even think of an answer. It doesn't even come up with a punchline or something interesting for Lincoln to say. It treats Lincoln as a special effect, and its cast as a living and breathing prop.

To promise children and adults wonder and excitement, and then give them recycled and uninspired garbage seems like a terrible trick being played on the audience. It made me angry, and I'm someone who found something to like about the original movie. That one at least had some kind of valuable hidden lesson about how history needs to be appreciated and preserved. This time, we've got Larry Daley (Stiller) running around like a video game character, dodging special effects. Sure, we got that in the last one, but there was a reason behind it all. He was an actual character with motivation. I'm afraid the only motivation here is greed. Greed to make more money after the original became a hit. Larry isn't even a museum guard anymore in this one. He's gone on to start his own business and does infomercials with George Foreman. (Rule no. 1 of celebrity cameos - It's not funny just to see someone doing a cameo. You have to give them something to do or say that's amusing.) When he hears that his historical friends at the Museum of Natural History in New York are being put into permanent storage, because the museum is being remodeled as a high-tech wonderland (with holographic exhibits), he decides to pay them one last visit.

The exhibits are packed away and sent in crates to the archives underneath the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C. The magical artifact that brings them to life at night is shipped with them, and trouble immediately starts when it falls into the hands of the revived Egyptian ruler, Kahmunrah (Hank Azaria, making the grave mistake that thinking the fact his character talks with an annoying lisp is funny.), who plans to use its true power to revive his evil army of the underworld. Larry gets a desperate phone call from Jedediah the cowboy (Owen Wilson) about the situation, catches the next flight to Washington, and poses as a night watchman so he can reach the archives and save his friends. He's joined along the way by Amelia Earhart (Amy Adams), who has also been revived by the artifact's power. That right there is pretty much it. Larry and Amelia run around the museum as other actors run around in the background and foreground. The movie never once slows down for plot, development, or to even answer the obvious questions. Questions like, why are there no actual guards within the Smithsonian at night? Also, wouldn't someone notice the Lincoln Memorial is up and walking around the streets?

I know, I'm not supposed to be asking these questions, and I wouldn't be if the movie actually held any sense of wonder. But Battle of the Smithsonian treats everything either as mundane, or as a lame gag. Kahmunrah assembles an "army of evil", including Ivan the Terrible (Christopher Guest), Al Capone (Jon Benthal) and Napoleon (Alain Chabat), but the movie does nothing with this idea. Just like everyone else, they blend into the background. Imagine what a real screenplay could do with these characters from different time periods being forced to work together. That would require actual thought. The main thought here seemes to have been, "How can we do the first movie, only bigger, louder, and less appealing"? It's always sad to see the inspiration of the original film turned into a charmless cash cow sequel. It's even sadder to see one good performance struggling for our attention amongst it all. The performance belongs to Amy Adams, and although she is likable as the feisty and sweet Amelia Earhart, not even she can rise above this material and make it worthwhile.

I'm sorry if I sound like a total cynic and a killjoy, but I hated this movie. I wanted it to end long before it did, and when it was over, I wanted to forget about it. Something I'll be trying my best to do as soon as possible when this review is finished. Night at the Museum wasn't a classic, but at least I could envision some sort of thought process going into it. Watching Battle of the Smithsonian, all I could envision was the cast having long, sad talks with their agents and dreaming of better scripts.

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