'Night at the Museum'

BY JAN STUART | Newsday Staff Writer

December 22, 2006

A volley of contented cackles greeted the final third of "Night at the Museum," a pea-brained fantasy-comedy with a riot of kid-pleasing special effects.

Making its splashiest screen appearance since "On the Town," New York's American Museum of Natural History holds its own against the tireless mugging of Ben Stiller, one of Hollywood's more shameless class clowns. Stiller tones it down a notch as Larry, a career-challenged divorcé who takes a job as the museum's lone night watchman in a last ditch effort to be a responsible dad.

The other guards (played by Dick Van Dyke, Bill Cobbs and, gasp, Mickey Rooney) have been sacked, victims of downsizing. As they hand over the keys, they purposefully neglect to inform him that the museum's dusty population of wax dummies, skeletons and statues comes alive after dark to wreak havoc.

Not a bad premise, as far as it goes. Under the producing command of glitz-meister Chris Columbus and director Shawn Levy, however, a modest set-up that in another era might have justified a low-budget Abbott & Costello throwaway has been given the full-blown, "Harry Potter"-cum-"Jurassic Park" treatment, complete with a chorus of seraphim wailing in wonderment over the soundtrack.

Since the museum is quite large, there are a lot of rooms for Stiller to dash around in as he is pursued by a Tyrannosaurus rex, threatened with being drawn and quartered by Attila the Hun and attacked with pin-sized blow darts by a miniature Mayan army.

The script by Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon is your basic Trivial Pursuit grab bag, referencing everything from "Brokeback Mountain" to "Gulliver's Travels." After a rambling first hour, "Night at the Museum" gathers some comic momentum as Stiller's canny night watchman forges alliances with his antagonists, who also include a Tom Thumb-ish cowboy (an unbilled Owen Wilson), an equally diminutive Roman warrior (an amusing Steve Coogan) and a saddle-sore Teddy Roosevelt (Robin Williams).

The film's more thankless assignments go to Ricky Gervais, reworking his British "Office" shtick to ghastly effect as the museum's officious director, and Carla Gugino, smiling decorously as a tour guide who can tell you everything you want to know about Sacagawea but were afraid to ask.