Night at the Museum
This contains elements of all sorts of previous movies – Bill and Ted, Jumanji, Liar Liar, The Librarian, you name it – but the one it seems most comparable to, perhaps due to the presence of Robin Williams and jungle creatures, is of course Jumanji. Unfortunately, the most amazing thing about Night at the Museum is that it shows how well that now over 10 year old flick (I know, it’s scary) has stood the test of time. Truly, as in Peter Jackson’s King Kong, the visuals here are nowhere more advanced than they were back then – the only difference is they’re now much, much easier to produce and you feel this in the slapdash way they’re thrown around here.
In the end the whole thing feels far too by the numbers, I mean you can almost literally see the boxes being checked as scene by archetypal scene plays out. Sure, it does hit the marks, and chugs along like a well-oiled machine. But it never really breaks the emotional ground and enters its own the way I felt things like Jumanji and even Liar Liar and the others did. The subplot between Stiller and his son feels painfully forced and is ultimately the corniest thing I’ve seen in a long time. The problem might be that there’s never really anything at stake, and much as some might argue that shouldn’t be necessary in a family film like this, I really felt the absence here. Ricky Gervais is hilarious, it’s actually amazing how funny he is by doing so little; but when something so cheap is by far the best thing in a movie like this (ok, second only to the Robin Williams line, “Good Lord, Laurence, why are you slapping a monkey?!”), that’s very depressing indeed.
All that said, I’m sure young kids will adore it – I could practically hear playgrounds buzzing with “Hey dum-dum, you give me gum-gum,” as soon as the line was first boomed (and it’s boomed a lot). I’m positive they won’t bat an eyelid if you showed them Jumanji instead, though, even if they weren’t even born when that came out. I know which one I’d sooner show a kid.