Movie Review / Night at the museum
Filed in: Arts and Entertainment
Tagged with movie, film, cinema, box-office, review,box office, museum, night
Last Modified Jan 18, 2007 at 05:09 PM PST by rajivanandViewed 1464 time(s)
Rated 
by 1 Cylivers
Night at the museum captures a retro-charm of the new york institution in an imaginative array of mind boggling CGI effects
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Night at the museum (2006)
I rated it
I am biggest sucker for CGI and imaginative imagery, but this one misfires all over the screen. Night at the museum is supposed to be a laugh riot but fails there miserably, party due to Ben Stiller.However, it does leave a pleasant aftertaste with its unique charm.
Stiller plays an unemployed, divorced father of a young boy who gets a job as a security guard at Manhattan's antiquated Museum of Natural History.
Soon, he discovers the place is haunted. Due to the magical power of an ancient Egyptian tablet, all the exhibits -- an eclectic mix of dioramas, stuffed animals and wax models of historical figures -- come alive at night and stay alive until dawn.
So he's chased around the museum by a Tyrannosaurus skeleton, Neanderthal men and Attila the Hun; besieged by Lilliputian cowboys, Roman legionnaires and Mayan warriors; and befriended by Teddy Roosevelt (Robin Williams), Sacajawea and an Easter Island moai.
It's a challenging job, but he learns to like it, and when the tablet is stolen and the enchantment of the place is endangered, he has to mobilize an army that includes a pharaoh, Christopher Columbus and a terra-cotta Chinese soldier to get it back.
As the movie stumbles along, Stiller is its biggest handicap. Entertaining in small doses but boring overall, specially when he's in every scene.
Director Shawn Levy ("The Pink Panther") brings off a few laughs, the PG-humor is fairly clean (one monkey urination gag aside), and the supporting cast Owen Wilson, Dick Van Dyke and Mickey Rooney (still ticking after 70-plus years as a star) -- is fun.
The script of the movie is flimsy and often self-contradictory, and its sensibility is shallow. But it's still out to impress and delight a family audience with the pageantry of human and natural history, and that's a surprisingly worthy ambition for a Hollywood comedy.
