This comedy doesn’t tickle the funny bone

History has been brought back to life again, and this time round it’s mostly at the Smithsonian where an ex-security guard, now new spangled entrepreneur, Larry Daley (Ben Stiller) arrives to save Natural American History’s tallest figures from the anonymity of an underground storage vault. It’s a wonderfully brilliant idea no doubt, but the narrative form adopted by Shawn Levy is far from able to bear the burden of more than a thousand years of history. He’s added a few too many names across several periods to the history sheet he exposed in the first NATM, causing a great deal of incoherence and several wide gaps in continuity.

Discarded in favour of high-tech holographic displays, Cowboy Jedediah (Owen Wilson), Teddy Roosevelt (Robin Williams), Amelia Earhart (Amy Adams), Egyptian Pharoah Kahmunrah (Hank Azaria), Ivan the Terrible (Christopher Guest), Napolean (Alain Chabat), Octavius (Steve Cougan), Dr McPhee (Ricky Gervais), Al Capone (Jon Bernthal), and many more are being shunted from the Museum of Natural History to an underground storage vault at the Smithsonian Institution, which houses the world’s largest museum complex with more than 136 million items in its collections There’s very little motivation for Larry to abandon his successful entrepreneurship in favour of nocturnal heroics at the museum 
The original had a bearable narrative hook, the new one seems to be merely a reason to hit the FX and anime button time and time again.

Chaos envelopes a leviathan Octopus, animated photos and paintings, the Wright brothers, Tuskegee airmen and many other fringe characters. The comedy, mainly cross-anachronisms and sly cultural references, do not sustain into a laugh riot. Levy and screenwriters Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon, turn everything into a bad joke. The art direction and production design are terrific. But too many characters, unappealingly engineered events, derived ideas and an overdose of special effects add more weight to the problematic and inconsistent narrative.

Night at the Museum 2 Battle of the Smithsonian
Cast:  Ben Stiller, Amy Adams, Robin Williams, Jonah Hill, Owen Wilson, Bill Hader, Steve Coogan, Ricky Gervais, Hank Azaria, Craig Robinson
Director: Shawn Levy
Rating: ««