Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
105 min, rated PG

A sequel to 2006′s Night at the Museum, Battle of the Smithsonian offers summer family fun. Lighthearted and silly as the original, the tale follows former night guard Larry Daley (Ben Stiller) as he tries to save his friends, museum displays who are brought to life at night by an ancient Egyptian amulet, from two evils — being locked away in storage or being destroyed by Kahmunrah, a megalomaniac pharaoh reanimated by the amulet.

The film’s charm mainly comes from the fact that the characters that come to life are delightfully one-dimensional, slavisly true to historical figures as they are represented. Opportunities to play stock characters haven’t come up in Hollywood since the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers were releasing films, and it’s nice to see screwball comedy get such a fun dusting-off.

The film has great casting, likely due to Stiller’s wise understanding that he cannot carry a movie on his own and needs a good cast around him to make the film work. It was nice to see the further blending of Judd Apatow alumni with Stiller’s usual ensemble members. Jonah Hill, Bill Hader, and Jay Baruchel are particularly charming in brief but memorable supporting parts. I’m hoping this ensemble can produce a nice foulmouthed grown-up comedy in the near future.

An ensemble piece like this has its good and bad moments — welcome cameos like Darth Vader and Oscar the Grouch, and ones that make your eyes roll, like cherubs that look suspiciously like the Jonas Brothers. Robin Williams returns with his picture-perfect, charming depiction of Teddy Roosevelt, and Bill Hader provides a nice foil to him, playing George Custer by channeling political caricatures of George W. Bush. Amy Adams is abrasively cheerful and inaccurately girly as Amelia Earhart. Her character suddenly deepens at the end, and it all makes sense, but I wish that these glimmers of something more profound had begun to shine through more often and sooner. Hank Azaria is picture perfect as a sinister-but-ridiculous kiddie villain, with inspired pompous, lisping voicework. The scenes where they had the cameras roll and just let him riff made it easier to sit through the more weakly written scripted scenes.

Not to say there aren’t moments for the grownups. The greatest treat thrown in for adults is a hilarious homage to 300 in the form of tiny diorama characters stabbing their enemies’ feet with toothpick-sized swords.

This is a good, but not great, family film. As cleverly as the original, it takes lessons from history that could be dry or unapproachable and makes them fun. Characters like the Tuskegee Airmen or Teddy Roosevelt can’t leap out so colorfully from a history book, and there are plenty of educational jewels scattered here and there, and it would be easy to see how one of the historical tales could catch a child’s attention and inspire more in-depth study. The script isn’t great, but it won’t be the intellectual holocaust that was Pokémon or similar kiddie fare. It’s sweet and entertaining, but not intelligent enough to become a favorite among parents, although it should get great mileage as a film that won’t annoy them to death should the kids make it a repeat offender on DVD.