Not Well Curated

Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian marks a sad cinematic milestone: it’s the first film in which Amy Adams has failed to completely charm the pants off me. She plays Amelia Earhart, or at least a wax statue of her brought to life by the magical Tablet of Akmenrah, and the idea of Adams wearing skin-tight jodhpurs and spouting nonsensical 1930s slang while tagging along with Ben Stiller and helping him defeat an ancient Egyptian pharaoh from taking over the world sounds like the most delightful notion ever. Except... it isn’t. The running gag of Earhart’s nonstop slang never catches fire, Adams and Stiller are surrounded by too many CGI distractions to develop any chemistry, and as a character, Earhart seems weirdly out of sync with the situation surrounding her. For crying out loud, Amelia: an Egyptian pharaoh has teamed up with Al Capone and Ivan the Terrible to hold your friends hostage and destroy the world! This is no time to chatter!

I watched the original Night at the Museum a couple of hours before seeing the sequel. I had heard awful things about it, and the involvement of Robin Williams and director Shawn Levy (The Pink Panther, Cheaper by the Dozen) led me to expect the worst. In fact, it turned out to be a decent enough kids’ movie. Sure, it’s a little too noisy, and goes a little too heavy on the CGI, but Stiller makes a good straight man, cinematographer Guillermo Navarro (who also shot Pan’s Labyrinth), gives the images have a handsome, burnished glow, and every so often someone like Mickey Rooney or Ricky Gervais or Paul Rudd pops up to make you smile. I even liked Robin Williams in it.

The sequel offers more of the same, although, like the first film, it’s never quite as enchanting as it ought to be. Battle of the Smithsonian’s greatest asset is Hank Azaria, who plays the villainous Kahmunrah — he’s come up with a hilarious voice for the role, a perfect Boris Karloff imitation, save for the foppish lisp that keeps undercutting his attempts to appear fearsome. There’s also a funny extended cameo by Jonah Hill — his scene with Stiller feels like it was parachuted in from an old Abbott and Costello movie. Mindy Kaling (Kelly Kapoor from The Office) gets only two lines as a tour guide at the Air and Space Museum, but she made me laugh with both of them.

But for every simple, quiet, offhand comic moment in Battle of the Smithsonian, there are six that involve a squid roaming the museum corridors, the Lincoln Monument coming to life, rockets being launched, or an extended reprise of the monkey-slapping scene from the first film. You can’t help but feel the enormous effort it took to make this movie, and yet you also can’t help but see all the missed opportunities: the interactions between Kahmunrah, Ivan the Terrible, and Al Capone ought to be more colourful, too many of the best characters spend most of the film separated or imprisoned, and the big “famous paintings come to life” gag was done better in Looney Tunes: Back in Action.

Amy Adams does look fantastic in those jodhpurs, though.