Review of Night at the Museum 2 cast- by Chicago Tribune

Full-text transcript of the review of Night at the Museum 2 

So to what do we owe this triumphant return knockout for the corporate jungle after you got fired? No, actually I sold my company to the world does move in mysterious ways.

I admit it. I was a little hard on the first night at the museum. The second time I saw it, I had my seven year old son next to me. And the story is simple. Irresistible premise had him hooked. And while we disagree plenty on movies, he and I, that film about the Museum of Natural History Night Guard who discovers that things get pretty lively after dark on some basic level, did the job. He went for it. It’s no great shakes, I think, but I hereby raise the original one and a half star pan of night at the museum to a two star. You could do worse half recommendation. Now comes the sequel and I like this one more. This one raises the stakes by relocating all the old natural history residents Teddy Roosevelt, Genghis Khan, the woolly mammoth to storage beneath the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. Now, Ben Stiller is no longer a guard.

He’s president of his own security gadget company. But he and his son leap back into action in order to save their old pals from world domination as represented by the vengeful Egyptian God, played by Hank Azaria doing a full on Boris Karloff lisp Ilford.

Any question? Yeah, I got one. How come you wearing a dress? This is not a dress. It is a tunic. It was the height of fashion three thousand years ago.

The director, Shawn Levy, never seems to know how long to let some of the verbal riffs go on and on and on and on. But he has a real ace in the hole in this picture. Amy Adams is Amelia Earhart, who becomes Stiller’s partner in adventure. Abrahim, free freeze. The one inspired visual notion here is that some of the paintings and photographs come to life as well as the statues and aircraft. So when Stiller and Adams disappear inside the famous black and white V-J Day cover of Life magazine, nineteen forty five, it’s pretty magical. Elsewhere, the movie’s more functional than magical, and it’s too bad a good comic actor like Christopher Guest barely warrants a single joke is Ivan the Terrible, but the flying sequences and night at the museum to really do give you a lift. And Amy Adams is truly an actress on a winning streak. Three stars for night at the museum, two for the Chicago Tribune. I’m Michael Phillips.

Oh, stop to stop.