Introduction
ICE Age 3 revived my dwindling interests in the sequels to successful movies. So I decided to check out Ben Stiller’s Night at the Museum II – Battleof the Smithsonian.
The Plot
Larry Daley(Ben Stiller) has moved on from his success story as the night watchman at the museum to found his own company, Daley Devices. Though the business is doing well something keeps tugging at his heart. He decides to visit his mates at the museum and is shocked to find that it is closed for renovations and the artifacts would eventually be replaced by a brand new interactive hologram program.
The artifacts are being shipped to Smithsonian to be kept in the basement archives. Larry gets a call from Jedediah that they are in trouble in Smithsonian from Kah-mun-rah(Hank Azaria) who is the elder brother of Ahk-mun-rah. Larry sets on a mission to help his friends and meets new mates and enemies in this adventure at the Smithsonian Museum.
Critic’s Viewpoint
The captivating aspect of the original Night at the Museum movie was the intrigue of seeing the museum coming to life at night and seeing the reaction of the night watchman to it. In this sequel that novelty aspect has worn off and unfortunately there does not seem to be much more to the movie to keep the audiences interested.
For starters all the things that come to life and the comic aspects of the movie seemed to be canned shots from the first movie being re-used. There was no novelty to that aspect at all. Even the monkey slapping scene was repeated almost verbatim, the only difference being that here there were two monkeys. All the different tribes had a similar feel to the first movie and though there were some more creatures like Octopus etc. going around, it simply was not very funny.
Coming to the performances, Ben Stiller was clearly very jaded compared to the first version and at times seemed to be overdoing it. The highlight though came from Amy Adams as Amelia Earhart. She was buzzing quite literally from the moment she came onto the scene and made some of the scenes quite watchable with her around. Hank Azaria was quite passable and even humorous at times as Kah-mun-rah. The rest of the pack were just trying to repeat their showing from the first installment of the movie and were coming up very much short!
The plot itself was so thin without any further novelty factor, that overall the movie just seems to be a stale rehash of the original.
Summary
All in all another poor sequel to successful movie. I would give this movie a low 2 star rating.
(Taken from my review published earlier at https://einions.com/review/Night_at_the_Museum_Battle_of_the_Smithsonian/content_487911034500)