From today's Oregonian....
It's nearly impossible to lather up much of an opinion about "Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian." Like the 2006 hit that precedes it, "Smithsonian" gets off to a clunky start before becoming an inoffensively diverting, middlebrow, brightly lit all-star kitchen-sink comedy in which the joke -- the entire joke -- is that classic historical exhibits have been cleverly brought to life by state-of-the-art special effects, and hey, sometimes those living exhibits are played by comic actors who've been funnier in other, raunchier movies.
I reviewed the first "Museum" back in 2006, and just had to dig that writeup out of my archives to even remember what happened. Having done so, I now realize that I basically just watched the first movie all over again -- only slightly bigger and without Dick Van Dyke and Mickey Rooney.
This time, Ben Stiller (now a successful inventor) has to don a security guard's uniform again to sneak into the Smithsonian, where Owen Wilson and Steve Coogan and most of the rest of the first film's exhibits have been moved into storage -- and where they're at war with evil reanimated exhibits (played by the likes of Hank Azaria and Christopher Guest) over the exact same magical Egyptian artifact from the first movie. There's a lot of pointless scampering about. The Lincoln from the memorial stands up and talks. The special effects make fine-art sculptures, paintings and photos come alive this time. Amy Adams has moxie as Amelia Earhart (and, if I may be unapologetically male, she looks remarkable in aviator trousers) -- but I'm not sure whoever wrote her dialogue has any idea how people in the '30s actually talked. And because they visit the National Air and Space Museum, planes and rockets fly around. That's kind of neat.
Your 12-and-unders will dig it, and it might even serve as a sort of movie-Bookmobile and get them to read a little history, or at least a little Wikipedia. But otherwise it's utterly dispensable.
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C-plus; 105 minutes, rated PG for mild action and brief language.
'Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian' (The Oregonian, Friday, May 22, 2009)
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