Stiff and stale, still with some laughs

It’s been a long, strange shift for Larry Daley, the night watchman at the Museum of Natural History in New York, but now it’s time for him to move on. That’s probably a good thing for the character that Ben Stiller has played since the original Night at the Museum in 2006, and for everyone else involved.

There are a few reasons for that. This is the third in the series and it has clearly already grown stale. There are numerous options for further additions in the series but one could easily imagine the slippery slope of the sliding scale that these things exist on. It would be far more plausible for any future Nights at the Museum to go straight to video, and what would be the point then?

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, it all started with Daley taking over duties from a team of three long-serving guards, played by Bill Combs, Mickey Rooney and Dick van Dyke. What they don’t tell him is that there is an ancient Egyptian tablet that offers magical life to the otherwise inanimate people and creatures on display in the museum but only at night. You can just imagine the hijinx!

That might have sounded like I was a bit sarcastic, but there were actually a lot of fun and funny moments in the first two movies: a dinosaur skeleton playing fetch, an Easter Island moai statue head repeatedly saying, “dum-dum” and a slap-happy monkey named Dexter. Other characters have included wax statues of Teddy Roosevelt (Robin Williams), Sacagewea (Mizuo Peck) and Attila the Hun (Dan Stevens), plus some miniature figurines of a cowboy from the Old West and an ancient Roman gladiator (Owen Wilson and Steve Coogan).

In this chapter, the magical powers of the tablet are fading for some reason and Daley must figure out how to get it going again. For this, he travels with the animated Ahkmenrah (Rami Malek) to the British Museum of Natural History to seek out his mother and father (Anjali Jay and Ben Kingsley) who will surely know the answer.

Thankfully, most of his nocturnal friends come along for the ride. This includes Daley’s son, Nick (Skyler Gisondo), who has become a young man and is ready to go out into the world on his own, much to his dad’s chagrin. There are some very funny moments in the proceedings, mostly involving Dexter and a prehistoric figure that looks a lot like Daley but with a more prominent brow ridge and a much lesser vocabulary. It’s all for the good gags.

This isn’t Gone with the Wind, after all. Many of the characterizations are a bit too stocky and it seems like everyone is phoning this one in. Even the monkey.

And that’s why this needs to be the last Night at the Museum. The very plot of this movie is about transitions and moving on to the next stage of one’s life. That’s enough of an explanation but it’s even more poignant and melancholy considering Robin Williams, whose Roosevelt character slowly loses his memory and mobility as a result of the erosion of the tablet. What a colossally serious metaphor for what happened to the beloved actor in the latter years of his real life. This was his last film and it’s all too fitting. More than a bit sad for a comedy, ’tis. It was Rooney’s last too, making it doubly impactful.

There couldn’t possibly be one of these comedies without Williams, even though his role is intentionally played for pathos, not laughs.

In the end, there were a few good yuks but it ends on a bittersweet note with two memoria. I doubt that even Ben Stiller could will a worthy comeback for this well-worn tale told on its lazy drift into the sunset.