Movies with Kevin
'Museum': Perfect for Year's End
© By Kevin Paquet, 2006

I like the end of the year. Besides Christmas, there’s also New Year’s. New Year’s is always wonderful: you’re either closing a nice chapter of your life, or escaping from a turbid Hell. Either way, you win.

The end of the year also lacks focus. The score for the year is set, basically—there really isn’t anything left to be done. And I think "Night at the Museum" captures that feeling perfectly. It’s not really a meaningful movie, but it isn’t really trying to be. It’s a perfect end-of-the-year flick: three generations of acting talent just having fun.

Larry (played by Ben Stiller) is a defective ex-husband and dad who is trying to win the love of his son by getting (and holding down) a job of some kind. Desperate to get a job in a short period of time, he ends up getting a job at the Museum of Natural History. There, he will be replacing Dick Van Dyke, Mickey Rooney and Bill Cobbs, whose characters are being laid off due to poor museum attendance.

As Ben Stiller finds out when the T-rex skeleton tries to kill him, the things in the museum come to life at night. This, it turns out, is because of an Egyptian plague that was delivered to the museum in 1952. This part of the film is handled with especial finesse: enough back-story to make the plot plausible, but not so much that it threatens to sink the movie.

Larry gradually comes to bond with the people and the creatures in the film, and I was once again impressed with the characters. A whole host of exhibits—cavemen, Romans, cowboys, animals, Huns, an Easter Island statue, Teddy Roosevelt, etc.—come to life and are pretty believable.

What I loved best, though, was the character interaction. Roosevelt, enacted by an unusually stable Robin Williams, is a particularly good example, as he guides Larry ("Lawrence") and tries to impress Sacajawea. Meanwhile, two tiny diorama armies—the cowboys, led by Owen Wilson, and the Romans, led by Steve Coogan, hate each other for some reason.

Larry grapples for control over the museum and his own life, and manages to succeed with a heartwarming blend of comedy, wisdom, and clichés. The perfect crowning touch is watching him get kicked around by Dick Van Dyke and his posse who, it turns out, have elected to steal the amulet on their way into retirement.

In the end, Larry must bring all of his limited competence and leadership skills to bear and try and stop a gang of thieves whose combined age is probably over 200. I love this film. It may be the most pointlessly awesome thing ever. It panders to no age group (more or less) and it never slows down.

Bonus points for Larry’s job agency application, the tour group, and psychoanalyzing Attila the Hun. Kevin gives "Night at the Museum" four stars out of five.