Night at the Museum 2

Magic tablets. Paintings and statues coming to life. A long evening spent talking with Lincoln, evading Napoleon and doing battle with bird-headed Egyptian warriors. If this is not just another acid flashback to the 1960s, then it must be the sequel to Shawn Levy’s Night at the Museum (2006).

Night at the Museum 2 has the same director, the same writers and the same core cast, but gone is the original film’s anxiety about a single father struggling to bond with his son, while the venue has changed from New York’s Museum of Natural History to Washington’s Smithsonian complex, ‘the biggest museum in the world’.

While former museum guard Larry Daley (Ben Stiller) has moved on to a lucrative career as a gadget inventor, his old friends have become metaphorical (as well as literal) museum-pieces, shipped off in crates to be archived in the storerooms beneath the Smithsonian Institute – but the life-giving Egyptian tablet has gone with them, reviving Kahmunrah (Hank Azaria), an ancient Pharaoh who plans to open the Gates of the Underworld and raise an army of the dead. Soon Larry is drawn back into the antics of reanimated exhibits, helped by old friends and new – including a plucky Amelia Earhart (Amy Adams) to push the feminist line in a male universe.

“History history, learning learning,” sighs museum director McPhee (Ricky Gervais) with a withering contempt that reflects rather precisely this film’s attitude towards both genuine education, and the sort of flashy multimedia spectacle (NATM2 included) that has become education’s substitute. For this is a scattergun trawl through human (albeit mostly American) history and culture, with the emphasis more on entertainment than instruction. Still, if at has few actual insights to offer into the complexities of the past, at least it serves for the young viewer as a primer in postmodernism.

Even kids who have only a sketchy notion of who the Pharaohs really were will be likely to remember, after seeing this film, that one of them rejected Darth Vader and Oscar the Grouch from the ‘Axis of Evil’ that he was mustering. Factoid after factoid is incongruously juxtaposed to offer glimpses of history and art that can be all at once awesome, inspirational, and even funny (especially when it is a show-stopping Azaria playing the Egyptian all effete and curmudgeonly).

It is a hit and miss affair, as episodic as any museum visit, and delivering surreal-lite laughs (a chorus of singing Einsteins, Rodin’s The Thinker as an empty-headed bodybuilder with a Queens accent) and innocuous messages (‘do what you love’; ’stick with your friends’) in place of any real substance – but then, kids have always loved the sweet puff of popcorn, and it is to them that this film is primarily aimed. They will love it – and they might even ask you afterwards who Lincoln (or at least ‘that statue guy with the beard’) is…

Anton Bitel

Anticipation:

History travestied by Ben Stiller – again.

Enjoyment:

It's patchy, but also undeniably funny.

In Retrospect:

Here history really is bunk – but the kids are smiling.