Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian is a foolish lark of a movie. It’s built on the concept that if you take a bunch of funny people, plop them down in the middle of a fanciful situation, and allow them to run amok you will get, if not hilarity, at least zaniness.
It’s a risky approach that has borne fruit wide-ranging in tastiness. There have been juicy pineapples like Ben Stiller’s Dodgeball and there have been dried up oranges that have spoiled many a lunch like Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. Night at the Museum falls somewhere in between. I’m thinking a tangerine on its last day of semi-goodness.
Night at the Museum doesn’t settle for simply letting comic talent improvise though, hoping for the best. It ups the ante by asking all of that unpredictability to coexist with special effects of a complexity worthy of Indiana Jones. This is comedy flying by the seat of its pants of the sort that once produced Ghostbusters. Sadly, we now have proof that it’s hard to catch lightning in the same bottle twice.
What’s wrong with this approach to comedy? Why do so many big improvised comedies feel so slack? The long answer is funny people like Robin Williams and Owen Wilson need room to move about and the freedom to invent while special effects require them to do the same thing over and over. The short answer is funny people are always at their funniest when they have characters to play.
There’s a rule of thumb that playing funny is almost certain to fail while playing a funny character straight is the surest path to belly-laughs. Compare Christopher Guest’s desperate attempts to be funny as an Ivan the Terrible statue in Night at the Museum to his insisting in This is Spinal Tap that the best way to push rock ‘n’ roll over the cliff is by dialing an amp to eleven. The difference is one of having a character to play – or not.
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