Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian

Release Date: May 22, 2009

Watch Date: April 4 – April 5, 2023

 

    Have you ever wanted to experience what a tiny portion of the Smithsonian was like without having to endure lines or pay ticket prices? Than this is the movie for you!

    Because that’s what this movie is, a fun tour of the Smithsonian, which is not a bad thing necessarily. But there’s no heart to it. No Nicky. A forced romantic plot that couldn’t possibly be continued past the one night. The Smithsonian is also completely destroyed without any consequences and exhibits returned from it without nary a piece of paperwork in sight. Maybe it’s the fact that I work in an extremely structured office, but that just seems unrealistic. Would watching people fill out requisition forms make for a fun movie? No. I own up to that. But it would at least fill in some plot holes for me.

    I do enjoy this movie, but it’s more for the villain than the adventure of Larry Daily. Kah Mun Rah is hilarious and his gang of historical bad guys are really well chosen, and well done. Does having three extremely famous henchmen not get enough time on screen though is kind of unfortunate. Al Capone and Ivan the Terrible don’t really get enough expansion, and Napoleon gets just enough to be momentarily funny.

    I liked the inclusion of Amelia Earhart, but she would have been served much better as Larry’s friend and companion, and didn’t need to be someone who Larry has an interest in. I also don’t think they served her character well to have her go from thinking Larry is an incompetent boob to being head over heels for him. Larry, at least, has a slightly more relatable arc. But it’s still all pointless because they can’t be together unless she ends up at the same museum, and even then they couldn’t have a proper relationship because she’s a wax model.

    The main conflict is meant to be that Kah Mun Rah wants the tablet to open a portal and summon an army from the underworld to take over the world. You know, usual villain stuff. But the main point of contention becomes that Jedidiah is trapped within an hourglass and slowly suffocated by sand. But he’s a miniature. And, as we’ve proven in the first film when Teddy got cut in half and was repaired, they can’t die in that way. So…Larry could have just hidden, refused to solve the riddle, waited for the sun to come up, taken Jedidiah out of the hourglass and gone back to New York, no harm, no foul.

    All in all, this film isn’t terrible, but it’s definitely not as good as the original. It’s still fun, don’t get me wrong, and President Lincoln is hilarious – which I have failed to mention but I needed to because Bob didn’t really know how to process snarky Lincoln and it was kind of the best part of the film – but it’s not the first one. Sequels are almost always worse. I stand by this.