An absolute monster hit from last holiday season — at $570 million
worldwide, with $250 million of that coming domestically — Night at the Museum dutifully continues the trend of Ben Stiller’s
physical abuse and debasement, which dates back to some of the comedian’s earliest
sketch work, and includes
Dodgeball,
both
Meet the Parents flicks,
Along Came Polly and, of course, the
1998 smash
There's Something About Mary.
Stiller stars as Larry Daley, a divorced dad and inveterate
dreamer who, needing to quickly get a normal job to keep from getting evicted,
and wanting to stay close to his son Nick (Jake Cherry), takes a position as a
night guard at the New York City Natural History Museum. The three downsized,
outgoing watchmen (Dick Van Dyke, Mickey Rooney and Bill Cobbs) give Larry a
quick tour and toss him a tattered instruction manual, but fail to tell him
that due to a mysterious, golden Egyptian tablet that was brought to the museum
years before, everything actually comes alive at night.
This includes animals galore; a marauding Attila the Hun
(Patrick Gallagher); a Tyrannosaurus Rex that wants to play fetch with his
detachable rib bone; former president Teddy Roosevelt (Robin Williams), astride
a horse; and thousands of Lilliputians — like Roman general Octavius (Steve
Coogan) and his bickering rival, Wild West cowboy Jedediah (Owen Wilson) — who
make up the museum’s miniature models and dioramas.
Thrown into the middle of this havoc, Larry tries to at
first merely survive and prevent the complete destruction of the museum. After
sunrise, he's ready to walk, but the dangled admiration of his son gets the
better of him, and Larry returns. He subsequently tries to impose some order on
all the creatures and icons indoors — if anything gets outside and isn't back
in its place by sun-up, it turns to dust — and then grapples with some bad guys
out to steal the aforementioned supernatural plate. Along the way he bonds with
his son, and tries to win over docent Rebecca (Carla Gugino), who's been long
laboring on her thesis on Sacajawea (Mizuo Peck), who just happens to be one of
the wax figures on display in the museum.
Night at the Museum downshifts just a bit in its
efforts to include and play up the more fantastical elements of its premise,
but there are still a few of these overly boisterous, capital-P performance
moments designed to goosingly remind you what a wild time you're having. The
movie is fleshed out from its roots in Croatian illustrator Milan Trenc's
children's book by co-screenwriters Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon (both
of Reno 911!), who together have no doubt made some nice loot tapping
out mid-budget studio comedies like The Pacifier, Herbie Fully Loaded, Taxi and Let's Go to
Prison. They provide a loose but sound structure here, and Stiller trots
out his characteristic flustered underdog bit, which offers up a few bright and sly moments
for older audiences.
The mixing of wild special effects with more chatty comedy
of awkward social interplay embodied by Wilson, Coogan and Ricky Gervais (above left, as
the museum's curator), though, feels like a halting mixture. Director Shawn
Levy, too, brings no galvanizing, unifying vision to the fore; he's the
definition of a point-and-shoot lenser, and there are several sequences that
open up a few crafty visual joke possibilities only to have them fall by the
wayside. It’s a fine enough time-whiling slice of family entertainment, certainly,
and it plays better on the small screen, where it seems like an effects-laden, ramshackle
inversion of the much more cleverly sketched Home Alone. That said, there's little that feels lasting about Night
at the Museum. Of course, you’ll likely want to see it some point, if only
to prepare yourself for the inevitable sequel.
The double-disc special edition DVD of Night at the Museum comes with a presto-chango lenticular slipcover,
and is presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen (full-screen is available
separately) with robust, if somewhat front-heavy English language 5.1 DTS and
5.1 Dolby surround audio tracks. Bonus material attached to the feature presentation
includes two audio commentary tracks — one from director Levy, and the other
from writers Garant and Lennon, which is much more entertaining.
Seventeen minutes of deleted scenes kick off the second
disc, a considerable amount for a movie that already clocks in at an hour and
50 minutes. Levy contributes optional commentary to most of these bits, explaining
where they fell in the story and the reasons for their cuts, which is mostly
just a matter of pacing. Some of these are just vintage Stiller riffs, but there
are also a few other odds and ends. Meanwhile, a clutch of a half dozen brief featurettes
on everything from the movie’s costumes and special effects work to its little capuchin
costar provide a nice overview of the production. Of a pair of Fox Movie
Channel pieces, the one with Levy recent film school grads is most interesting,
if also a bit chilling. A 10-minute storyboard-to-screen comparison, a
six-minute blooper reel, a 21-minute Comedy Central clip-fest show and a
DVD-ROM game round things out. To purchase the movie from Amazon, click here. C (Movie) B+ (Disc)
