Aren’t trips to the museum supposed to make you smarterer?
If anything, I felt dumber after “Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian” and perhaps came out knowing less about history than I did going in.
Not that I expected a summer tentpole to be especially brainy, but this made me long for the sharp, incisive intellectualism of, say, “Friday the 13th” or “Confessions of a Shopaholic.”
In some future multimedia museum, “NATM2” might serve as an exhibit for early 21st century cinema -- approaching limitlessness technically but limited creatively by the very fact that every single person has to be able to “get it” if the $150 million budget’s to be recouped.
“NATM2” is all about the best CGI and A-list talent money can buy.
A digital octopus unfurls, a mob of kangaroos are hopping mad, a pterodactyl flaps about, a classical sculpture shows off muscles and a massive Abe Lincoln kicks ass.
Ben Stiller’s joined again by Steve Coogan, Owen Wilson and Robin Williams, with Amy Adams, Hank Azaria, Christopher Guest, Bill Hader, Ricky Gervais and Jonah Hill along for the ride.
It’s an exhausting cast list, nearly as frightfully expensive as the CGI mayhem. Which makes it ironic that by far the biggest laughs from the kids in my audience came from Dexter the Capuchin monkey slamming Stiller’s fingers in a packing crate or slapping him in the face -- bits of physical comedy that could’ve been found in a $100 one-reeler from this time last century.
Such pure outbursts of mirth are rare, though, with “NATM2”’s humor feeling as cluttered and overstuffed as its 13-character poster.
There are two strains of joke here, neither offering much nourishment to adults.
The first has Stiller and Hill/Azaria/whoever picking at a pedantic notion (touching/height/whatever) and blowing it up into what’s supposed to be a hilarious freeform riff. Thing is, if you don’t find this style of japery funny, you’re left with a repetitive dead spot as the film tries to convince us comebacks like Jonah Hill’s “Did they run out of interesting jokes at the joke store you shop at?” are anything other than self-amused screenwriting.
It works best in Azaria’s fictitious Pharoah Kahmunrah’s fussy, parsing dialogue -- “I’m half-God, once removed, on my mother’s side” -- but “The Simpsons” voice master creates a massive impediment to our enjoyment by lumping the villain with a campy British lisp.
Worse, by an order of magnitude, is “NATM2”’s insistence on turning most historical and mythical characters into vessels for lame pop-culture jokes. You can soon instinctively count off the beats until Rodin’s Thinker or Einstein bobbleheads or the monumental Abe Lincoln bust out some mid-2009 dudespeak as a prelude to breaking into song.
Adding insult to injury is that these gags are then explained in dialogue, as they are in the diabolically stupid Epic/Date/Disaster Movie abominations. So that when Jonas Brother cherubs break into Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On,” it’s deemed necessary for Larry to helpfully call it “the love theme from ‘Titanic.’”.
