Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb

Release Date: December 19, 2014

Watch Date: April 15, 2023

 

    Life has been…chaotic in our household for the past few days. That’s putting it mildly. I’m hopeful things will begin to calm down, but you never can tell with two kids running around, a day, careers to manage. Fingers crossed.

    We needed Robin Williams last night. Needed. And maybe this movie is incredibly bittersweet for his inclusion in it. His last film. When I watched it in the theatre I cried. When Bob, watching the last last film his favourite actor would ever perform in, watched it for the first time last night, he cried. Robin Williams was one of the greats – and completely irreplaceable.

    So was this film a good send off?

    I think so.

    I think it’s fitting we got to say goodbye to a character in a way most of us will never be able to say goodbye to the man himself. In a series that became about finding your true self, being honest about the things that give you purpose in life, I think this film caps off that message really well. And I think it’s the perfect message for Robin Williams to end on.

    Unlike ‘Smithsonian’, which was ostensibly just a glorified tour of an extremely large museum, we don’t get to see much of the British Museum. We rush through a few galleries, sure – full of stolen artefacts, Bob would like me to point out, as if America is totally innocent of that crime – but we barely interact with any of it. Even Ahkmenrah’s parents, the who goal of their visit to London, are only on screen for maybe ten minutes total. In a way, it would have been nice to see more of the museum, maybe not as much of a tour as ‘Smithsonian’ but a little more about the museum itself.

    Lancelot is…well I think he’s a fun character but a bad villain. You can’t really blame them though. They’ve already had security guards be the bad guys. You’ve got a member of Ahk’s family, and a handful of famous historical villains in the same movie being villains. They kind of tapped out by the third film.

    They also try to bring this movie back to it’s roots, a father and son relationship – and they completely cut out any hint of romance which is for the best – but they don’t do a very good job of it. The tablet being destroyed seems like a much bigger issue, and Nicky growing up is sort of a side thing that, since Nicky was pretty much just ignored in the last film it feels forced to have him be a main influence in Larry’s life again.

    I love this series, and I think, taken as a whole, it’s probably one of the more well rounded of the trilogies released in the modern era. But once I start it, I know I have to finish it and realize that Robin Williams has passed. So I really have to be in the right mood. But that doesn’t make it bad, and in fact, I encourage everyone to watch it, learn about some history and discover a little bit of the magic that can be found in any museum – ancient Egyptian tablet or not.