I really liked Night at the Museum. I saw it more or less by accident (I missed the movie I wanted to see), but I was delighted. It was as good as a movie can be without being in the least bit serious because it sold its characters and told its story by means of very a compelling texture and engaging action.
I was hoping that NATM2 would be at the very least the same movie twice. In fact it may represent the most enormous waste of talent in any film I have ever witnessed. It is a textbook case of cinematic dysfunction.
Ben Stiller is a fine comic actor. He is about as good as anyone is being the straight man in a ridiculous situation. Amy Adams, Owen Wilson, Robin Williams, and Steve Coogan, that's a lot of acting talent to pour down the drain. Likewise, the writing was excellent, in bits and pieces. There's a scene where Stiller's Larry Daley engages in a verbal and then physical tussle with a Smithsonian guard that is both brilliant and appalling out of place. It goes on too long for any good that it was doing in the movie.
Finally, the Computer Graphics are flawless. Everything, the giant octopus, the hawk-headed soldiers of doom, the cherubs singing soupy disco numbers, all of it was visually compelling. If you want to know what it would look like should a two inch high Roman solider to ride a squirrel into battle against full sized people, well, this is your chance.
The trouble is, none of this added up to a story. It's as if the director summoned a lot of high priced writing talent (say about a seventy different writers) and asked them for ideas. Then he tried to use every single idea, regardless of how incongruous it might be, and forgot about the plot.
Worse still, a lot of the routines were offensive. The walking Lincoln from the Lincoln memorial was stupid. There's a scene where Stiller is slapped repeatedly by two capuchin monkeys and it goes on forever. Adam's Amelia Earhart was great for about two minutes. But for the rest of the movie she kept doing exactly the same spunky women routine until you wanted her to crash into the ocean. This movie was dreadful.
Why are Hollywood sequels so frequently bad? It looks like an easy job: do the same movie over again, or apply the same formula to a new situation. Why can't Hollywood learn to exploit its own success? There's a mult-million dollar prize for the answer.
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