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Night At The Museum 2

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Cert: PG

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Dir: Shawn Levy. Cast: Ben Stiller, Robin Williams, Owen Wilson, Amy Adams, Jonah Hill, Bill Hader, Ricky Gervais, Christopher Guest

 

Description: Kind-hearted security guard Larry Daley has left behind his old job at the Museum of Natural History to head his own company yet he hankers for the excitement of the good ole days with President Teddy Roosevelt, toy cowboy Jed and mighty Octavius and his legions of inch-high Roman soldiers. Returning to his old haunt, Larry is distraught to learn that all of his favourite exhibits have been packed up in crates and shipped off to the archives of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C.. Having arrived at their new home, Jed and co inadvertently wake Egyptian ruler Kahmunrah from his eternal slumber and the dastardly pharaoh plots to take over the world with the help of Ivan The Terrible, Al Capone and Napoleon.

Country: US. 2009. 104mins

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Funny men in Night at the Museum 2

 

A Chaplin for our times: Ben Stiller is performing with more brio than ever

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An economic downturn is usually good news for comedy. Most of you probably don’t want to think about the Great Depression but if you do you’ll quickly find yourself thinking of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. In Britain during the Eighties, when unemployment was at a frown-making three million, the nation was rolling about every night to The Young Ones, Spitting Image and Blackadder. There’s no business like crap business for exposing the collective funny spot of a generation, which might be a way of saying Ben Stiller and his friends are about to take over the known universe.

Stiller is 43 now and only getting into his stride. He rode the upturn very well, making people laugh at new things in Zoolander, There’s Something About Mary, Meet the Fockers and Reality Bites but it was obvious from last year’s Tropic Thunder that the recession is putting fresh vitamins into his juice. He is performing and directing with more brio than ever before, pulling the best out of that Frat Pack generation of comedians he stands at the head of, including Jack Black, Owen Wilson, Will Ferrell, Tina Fey and Steve Carrell. Stiller is also the kingpin behind a younger generation of comic actors associated with Judd Apatow — who variously produced, wrote and directed Superbad, Knocked Up and Pineapple Express — a friend who got his break producing The Ben Stiller Show in 1992. So as we go to hell in a hand-cart, will the journey be made most bearable — perhaps most excellent — by the company of an actor who knows what to do with his face when his dick gets caught in his zip?

Night at the Museum 2, directed by Shawn Levy, has the kind of laughs that might convince you that nothing is as bad as it seems: the movie is no masterpiece but if you could plug its good nature into the national grid you could probably keep Birmingham alight for a month. Stiller stars, once again, as Larry Daley, who was the museum night-guard in the previous (and much less good) film. He is now a rich entrepreneur, the man behind Daley Devices, a manufacturer of daft household appliances, and is of course lost to his former friends and associates. This is probably a good thing in a grown up man, given that his friends and associates were previously a bunch of toys and exhibits at the Natural History Museum who came alive when the lights went down.

But it always suits Stiller never entirely to be grown up and, in the new movie, we quickly find him called back into service when his favourite exhibits are moved from New York to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington. The items have become unfashionable and will be kept in storage, but by the time Daley receives a panic call from Jedediah, a cowboy figurine played by Owen Wilson, it is obvious that Daley’s imaginary friends are under attack from the Smithsonian’s hordes of ancient warriors. Not only from them, but also from Ivan the Terrible, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Al Capone, all brilliantly in character, so much so with the latter that he appears in black and white.

Sounds daft? But of course. Night at the Museum is so daft it makes Star Trek: The Movie look like the collected works of Bertrand Russell. The film is silly to the point of genius, it is brilliantly absurd, catchy, involving and irrelevant, which might make it the best Saturday night movie of the year so far. Stiller’s character goes to war with his friends’ enemies and he deploys all the stupidity at his disposal, ably assisted by one of the prettier Smithsonian exhibits to come to life, Amelia Earhart (sparkily played by Amy Adams). Director Levy makes great use of the Smithsonian’s flying machines and antiquities, while actors such as Steve Coogan (as the centurion) and Ricky Gervais (Dr McPhee) establish pretty high levels of laughter and chaos in small parts. It is an aspect of Stiller’s magpie talent that he should attract the best American and British comedy actors into the same movie under conditions of such silliness, but the fact that he does so should be seen as a service to the internationally down-in-the-mouth. Long after he stopped being baffled, Charlie Chaplin would be pleased.

“Comedy is acting out optimism,” Robin Williams once said, and in Night at the Museum 2, in the part of Teddy Roosevelt, Williams shows that the road to betterment is formed of jokes as well as tears. There is nowadays something senatorial about his sense of comic purpose, so he pronounces every line as opposed to speaking it, the sort of thing actors do long after they have passed the point of doubting their effectiveness.

The film does the traditional thing of sometimes putting sentiment in the way of invention —Chaplin did that too, sometimes disastrously — and you have to hold your breath and hope the romantic rubbish goes away before it spoils the atmosphere of anarchy and cheerfulness. Stiller knows when to stop, as does Levy, so the film dances through its clichés without pain.

The thing that gives this Night at the Museum its extra punch — and its four-star rating, as far as I’m concerned — is a sequence set among the Smithsonian picture galleries, where the artwork comes to life and plays a part in the shenanigans of Stiller and his girl as they struggle to find a way to help their friends down in the archive.

Not only do the paintings come alive but they get involved: it’s a good, old-fashioned example of American ingenuity to see the solemn farmer in Grant Wood’s American Gothic painting hand his pitchfork over to a duelling Stiller, while one of Jeff Koons’s red balloon dogs bounces across the gallery. On the other wall the people in Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks also come to life: I’m sure if you look closely you’ll see those iconic persons from some of America’s gloomiest days looking out at Stiller and beginning to crack a smile.

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