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Recommend Movie Review - 'Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian' (Email)

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Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian Starring Ben Stiller, Amy Adams, Hank Azaria, and Owen Wilson Directed by Shawn Levy Rated PG

Not much has changed from Night at the Museum to Night at the Museum: Battle for the Smithsonian. There's some nonsense early on about Larry Daley (Ben Stiller) becoming a successful gadgeteer (I hestitate to call someone who comes up with a glow-in-the-dark flashlight an inventor), but otherwise, it's pretty much the same.

If you didn't see the first one, you must not have children. But just in case, what hasn't changed from the original to the sequel involves museum pieces coming to life once the sun goes down.

Not a bad premise for a family movie, really, and the first one succeeded to the degree that it did on precisely that basis.

So in a way, you can't blame writers Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant (Reno 911!) from setting the same movie in a bigger museum this time. What else are they going to do, make Ben Stiller an expert fly fisherman or something? Plus, there are plenty of other historical figures to pull out of the moth balls when the scene shifts to the Smithsonian.

The specifics don't matter much, because you're either along for the ride or you're not. But I do wish there was a better villain than Hank Azaria's risen Pharaoh, Kahmunrah. He's out to capture the precious ancient tablet that enables all of these wax statues to come to life every night, believing it can raise an army of undead to help him rule the world.

He's supposed to be a boob, however, so Azaria rigs him with the voice of Bobby "Boris" Pickett from the Halloween tune "Monster Mash" and tries way, way, way too hard for laughs. I don't say this often about Azaria, but he's really lowering the property value in this role.

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