Review – Night at the Museum

As of this writing it’s only June, but this is still an odds-on favorite for “disappointment of the year.” The concept – that the displays in a natural history museum come to life at night – had immense potential. And the picture has enough of a budget to be able to pull off the visuals required (indeed, some of the effects here are quite good). But then someone somewhere decided to turn the whole show over to the comic “genius” of Ben Stiller. As a result, almost every gag in the whole production falls flat, the jokes taking two or three times longer than necessary, their over-elongation strangling them. The parts that work do so quite well. They’re just simply too few and too far between. Mildly amusing