There are so many intriguing characters in "Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian" that you watch in amazement at how bad it is. You realize right away why this is the case. There's almost no story. The comedy bits aren't zany enough, and the action is exhausting rather than exuberant.
Ben Stiller returns as night watchman Larry Daley, who's now a successful entrepreneur having invented the glow-in-the-dark flashlight. The flashlight joke is the best idea in the movie. He discovers that his beloved Museum of Natural History is undergoing renovation. The moldy old exhibits will be dumped, and the popular New York City attraction will be turned into an interactive playland. High-tech digital is in. Stuffed monkeys are out. The museum's collection is going to be placed in the cavernous storage area of the Smithsonian Institution down in Washington, D.C. So Daley has this brainstorm. He decides to give his old pals like Jedediah the cowboy (Owen Wilson) and Sacajawea (Mizuo Peck) a night of freedom. One last fling, as it were. Uninteresting director Shaun Levy and his failed screenwriters Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon throw in a couple of monkeys for what they must have thought was good measure.
The real problem is that the film has nowhere to go once the premise is established. Stiller, who was once a sharp satirist, has sold out. He's reduced to having himself repeatedly slapped by those very same monkeys.
There is a ray of light in the film. It's Amy Adams as aviator Amelia Earhart. She creates a believable character and talks in a wonderfully snappy patter with lots of terrific lingo. But nothing else approaches her whimsy and engaging personality. The rigidly formulaic movie literally becomes a parade of displaced artifacts.
In addition to Stiller, Wilson, Peck and Adams, you've got Ricky Gervais as the museum's self-important bureaucrat Dr. McPhee, Steve Coogan as Octavius, Robin Williams as Teddy Roosevelt, Hank Azaria as a Pharaoh and also as Rodin's statue The Thinker, Christopher Guest as Ivan the Terrible, Bill Hader as General George Armstrong Custer, Alain Chabat as Napoleon Bonaparte, John Bernthal as Al Capone, Patrick Gallagher as Attila the Hun, and Eugene Levy as the voice of multiple Albert Einstein bobble-head dolls. Too much? Trust, me there are more.
How about assorted Neanderthals, Huns, Tuskegee Airmen, gangsters, sailors, Air and Space Mission Control Technicians, not to mention Oscar the Grouch, the farmer and his wife from the American Gothic painting, and George Foreman as himself? And yes, The Thinker is in the Rodin Museum in Paris, but let's not get bogged down with that.
A better director might have found ways to utilize all these characters in scenes in which they actually interact with each other. Instead, what we mostly get is each historical figure being given a moment to toss out a couple lame lines and then move on to that great packing crate in the basement.
The thrust of this overblown feature is that the angry Pharaoh still has dreams of taking over the world, but he'll start with the Smithsonian. Is that clever? No. Funny? Not at all. It boggles the mind to think that this tired and desperate effort cost $150 million to make.
"Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian" is strictly for undiscriminating kids, and I wonder if there are any of them left. Except for Adams' Earhart, there truly is no sense of adventure. By the time the Day-Glo octopus shows up, you may want to run screaming from the theater.
It's so easy to dismiss "Terminator Salvation" that I re-ran the movie in my mind to be absolutely certain that I didn't forget anything, didn't forget some nugget of originality that I could share with you. I didn't.
The film is nothing more than an assembly-line product. Call it canned. Call it vacuum-sealed. Call it whatever you want, but it genuinely is the cinematic equivalent of empty calories.
For nearly two hours, humans and machines fight each other in a junk-strewn wasteland. There's none of the fascinating mythology we learned in the first "Terminator" (1984). There are no groundbreaking special effects comparable to the second "Terminator" (1991). And, there is not a whisper of the humanity found in the third "Terminator." (2003)
This new "T4" is a bad joke. You sit and wonder what empty-headed director McG (aka Joseph McGinty Nicol) and hapless screenwriters John D. Brancato and Michael Ferris were thinking. Did they understand the entire Terminator history? There's nothing that resembles good storytelling. Hell, there's nothing that resembles a good story.
John Connor (Christian Bale) is still fighting Skynet, the imperious villainous entity that still hasn't wiped out Earth. We're a decade down the road, and all you get is some hogwash about wanting to go back in time to prevent things from happening that would alter the future. There are car chases, helicopter chases and motorcycle chases. There are fistfights between a humanoid cyborg and robotic Skynet's men of steel, because bullets don't work. Connor leads the submarine-based resistance, and he's angry. Nothing else happens.
"Terminator Salvation" is indefensible as both entertainment and science fiction. It's so vapid, so plastic, that you don't care what goes on. It's a video game you get to watch, but not play.
Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan won the best director award at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival for his drama "Three Monkeys." His work is abstract and deliberate. He has been compared to Michelangelo Antonioni, who is one of my favorite directors. I accept the comparison.
"Three Monkeys" is about doing the wrong thing because someone with power thinks it's the right thing.
While driving his car, a politician in the middle of a re-election campaign is involved in a hit-and-run accident. He actually has a driver of his own to chauffeur him to events, so he begs the man to take the fall for the crime. The driver will only have to serve a short prison term in exchange for a monetary payoff, so he accepts the offer.
During his absence from his remarkably average family, his son, who is adrift, fails his college entrance exam and becomes involved in risky endeavors. The driver's wife begins an affair with the husband's boss, the corrupt politician who sees nothing he does as amoral. Getting re-elected is the only thing that matters. Niceties and proprieties be damned. But the wife believes that her status in society can only change because of a hypocritical person's benevolence.
As the characters do their little dance of life, big lies become even bigger lies. Small dangers become greater dangers. The ruling elite continues domination over the middle class. Honor falls by the wayside. Obligations are like loaded pistols. "Three Monkeys" is a very interesting and visually beautiful movie about arrogance and self-interest.
Director Ceylan, who co-wrote the screenplay along with Ercan Kesal and Ebru Ceylan, is fascinated with what goes on in the human psyche. He wants to know why decisions are made. And once he's dragged his characters through the traps into which they've fallen, he's equally fascinated by the potential for forgiveness.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | May 26 2009 |