Another night in another museum

Raise your hands: Who thought that they really needed to make a sequel to the Ben Stiller comedy "Night at the Museum"?

I didn't think so.

Some sequels are made because the audience is so in love with the characters that they want to know what happens next to them. OK, that hasn't been true since "After The Thin Man," but at least some sequels can fake being made to satisfy the audience's desire to see more of the characters. And then there is "Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian."

The same cast and crew returns with essentially the same idea, only bigger -- and, alas, lamer. Stiller is back in a museum where the exhibits come to life, only this time it is the Smithsonian Institution, the largest museum in the world. But bigger does not mean funnier. In this case, it appears only to mean busier.

Writers Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon, who also wrote the first script, set up the story so that exhibits representing the forces of good wind up fighting forces representing the forces of evil, who want to take over the world, etc. Oddly, they keep the forces of good boxed up in a trailer for a majority of the movie, leaving the fight mostly in the hands of Stiller's character Larry and Amelia Earhart -- one of the exhibits that has come to life.

The usually wonderful Amy Adams co-stars as the plucky, spunky, adventure-loving Earhart, and for perhaps the first time in her career she sounds a singularly sour note. It's not just that the part is poorly written (she communicates almost entirely in 1920s slang, and not always correctly), it is that she doesn't believe the character at all. And neither do we, frankly. She and Stiller display zero chemistry, which sometimes happens, but in this case one wonders if she even wanted to be on the set.

On the other hand, Stiller uncharacteristically shows a few moments of humor. In general, these are unimpressed reactions to other characters' pretensions or excesses, but this is a comedic trait he has apparently perfected. Along with his reactions, a small handful of funny moments can be found from some of the other characters being pretentious or excessive, particularly Hank Azaria's evil Egyptian emperor.

But the good bits number no more than a few in an uninspired film. Perhaps the film is so uninspired because nobody wanted the sequel, anyway.