Cinema - Night at the Museum

When I heard the premise for Night at the Museum, I was gripped by an (entirely hypothetical) feeling of parental approval. Its plot provoked a flood of warm and politically sound inferences. What could be more worthy than this simple story inspired by the wonder of childhood visits to the Natural History museum? A story which realised that age-old suspicion that something must happen to all those lions and tigers and dinosaurs after dark. Children will learn to love museums, I mused. They will begin to value this cruelly threatened sector of our cultural landscape via a film which literally brings them to life. History, paleontology, anthropology will all be theirs and they won’t even know it. And yet.
Alarm bell one started with the involvement of director, Shawn Levy, whose previous pictures have included Cheaper by the Dozen and an ill-conceived remake of The Pink Panther (both bombed). The second was Ben Stiller in the lead, (his presence in anything is usually enough to make me switch off.) Not that he has much acting to do in this anyway. As a hapless father who gets a job as night watchman at the unexpectedly lively New York Natural History museum, he spends most of the action running to or away from various special effects. Where acting expectations are higher, such as an appearance from Ricky Gervais, these are only proportionate to the rising levels of disappointment. Gervais is embarrassing as a watered down David Brent character, only he’s not in on the joke this time. Hopefully it won’t give museums a bad name, though. So much for expectations. ER