Exhibiting improvement

After reading E.L. Konigsburg's marvelous From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler as a kid, I could think of nothing more exciting than running away from home, like Konigsburg's young protagonists, Claudia and Jamie, and secretly living within New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. In fact, I still find the idea appealing.

This was obviously not a rare response to Konigsburg's book, as Wes Anderson included a very sweet homage to it in The Royal Tenenbaums. It's also conceivable that the story was a favorite of the Croatian illustrator and writer Milan Trenc, who created the children's picture book titled Night at the Museum, which was set in New York's Museum of Natural History.

The success of Trenc's picture book, in which a museum watchman finds the exhibits coming to life, inspired author Leslie Goldman to novelize the story for young adult readers. It was this version that led to director Shawn Levy's family film of 2006, which, unfortunately, became a festival of mugging for rumored funnyman Ben Stiller.

Regardless of Levy's heavy-handedness and Stiller's stillborn shtick, the film version of Night at the Museum became a great hit - so much so that Hollywood has naturally attempted to duplicate its success with a sequel.

Burdened as it (and we) must be with Stiller's return performance as museum night watchman Larry Daley, Levy's Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian is actually a much stronger film, far more entertaining than its predecessor. This is due to three improvements: a better script, a finer use of CGI technology and less screen time for Stiller.

As Ron Howard's recent Angels and Demons manages to be a Tom Hanks film without much of Tom Hanks, this latest Museum is salvaged by star Stiller taking his rightful place in the back seat to Amy Adams, Hank Azaria and a legion of other good actors that fill the secondary roles. When the focus is on Stiller, you feel as if oxygen were being siphoned from the cinema, particularly in one painful improvisatory cameo too far, where Stiller goes head-to-head with Judd Apatow regular Jonah Hill. Anyone who survived the comic riffs of Stiller and his Museum buddy Owen Wilson at the Oscars some years back will fully feel the leadenness of the scene.

The scenario of the sequel is simple enough: The Natural History museum's stash (with its wax Teddy Roosevelt, taxidermy wildlife and out-of-place Egyptian bric-a-brac) is to be moved into storage at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. When Stiller's Larry Daley learns of this, he naturally suspects that the nightly coming to life of the Natural History museum's collection (wax figures, taxidermia and Tyrannosaurus rex bones combined) may now spread to the Smithsonian's collection.

In no time, the first film's heroes - Roosevelt, Sacajawea, Custer and a handful of cowboys, Huns and centurions - will find themselves in pitched battle against Al Capone, Ivan the Terrible, Napoleon and the mad Pharaoh Kahmunrah.

In the ensuing struggle, the formerly exhibited heroes will be joined by Amelia Earhart, a gift-shop shelf of bobble-head Einsteins (voiced by Eugene Levy) and a monumental Abraham Lincoln, escaped from his memorial on the Mall.

As with Levy's first Museum outing, the CGI is first-rate. But, in this film, the director utilizes the technology for some astonishing segments that thoroughly best anything from the 2006 film, or, for that matter, any other film.

In one of the most inventive scenes in recent American cinema, Levy has Stiller's Larry Daley and Amelia Earhart (the superb Amy Adams) fleeing some of Capone's goons by hiding in a wing of famous paintings, photographs and sculptures. Here, a Crying Girl of Roy Lichtenstein, a Balloon Dog of Jeff Koons and a mobile of Alexander Calder all come remarkably to life. Better still are the snowballs hurled at Larry from a Grandma Moses winter scene, and the undulating, undried splashes of a Jackson Pollock painting that almost threaten to spill from their frame.

This interaction goes further. The pair's battle against Capone's men is joined by Edward Hopper's Nighthawks and Grant Wood's dour American Gothic couple. However, the film's greatest moment comes when Larry and Earhart escape into Alfred Eisenstaedt's famous photograph of the sailor and nurse kissing in Times Square in V-J Day. Their entry into Eisenstaedt's dizzying, monochromatic New York is a stunning achievement (there's also a nice little joke set up, which will conclude the film).

The cast, whether the originals - Owen Wilson's cowboy, Robin Williams' Roosevelt, Steve Coogan's Octavius - or the newer members, particularly Hank Azaria's nefarious pharaoh, mesh well together. There are also some clever, time-twisted meetings and pairings, such as the budding romance between Roosevelt and Mizuo Peck's Sacajawea (who is appropriately contemptuous of Bill Hader's preening Custer), and a great pharaoh using the tatty wingback chair of Archie Bunker for his throne. There's also a lovely pas de deux between Earhart and one of Degas' Little Dancer sculptures.

It is in such moments as these that anybody who might think themselves too old to run away and live furtively in a museum might reconsider. That is, provided Ben Stiller has found employment elsewhere.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at
ssilvis@praguepost.com