Dead End: DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE

“Welcome to the MCU,” Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds), the irreverent regenerative mutant with a fourth-wall-breaking power, tells a Wolverine (Hugh Jackman). To this he adds: you’re joining it at a low point. You can say that again. Meant to be a joke about the lower box office and more mixed reception of recent Marvel Cinematic Universe pictures, this movie, the thuddingly obvious Deadpool & Wolverine, is the actual nadir for the whole hydra-headed franchise. Even by Deadpool standards, it is astonishingly witless and empty. It’s a movie with nothing at stake, in which nothing much of consequence happens, and in which every act of violence or feint toward character development is ultimately meaningless. (It doesn’t even, in the end, despite its promises, bring Deadpool or Wolverine into the MCU!) Its tone is typical of its meta-antihero’s: cynical, sarcastic, insincere. But it feels even worse, somehow, shorn from the comparatively more authentic edge of the initial two entries produced under 20th Century Fox. Since that studio was absorbed by Disney, that edge is now queasily subsumed within the sturdy sentimentality and baseline simplicity of the MCU, which continues its project of painting the earlier efforts of Fox (and others) as unsanctioned variants of the Sacred Timeline. That whole concept comes from the largely satisfying TV series Loki, which has some fun with the idea of hopping through time and multiverses. The problem, though, is that one must care about the characters to track motivations across a conceit in which anything is possible and nothing is permanent. And Deadpool is awfully hard to care about as a real character; he’s more of a stunt and a goof at best. It might make sense to pair him as a mismatched partner to Jackman’s Wolverine, whose many film appearances have been tense and tortured; instead it’s a one-note irritation with a wild card bouncing off a stone wall.

Any chance of taking the stakes or characterizations as anything but obnoxious and tedious vanish quickly. The movie opens with a phony sequence in which Deadpool slaughters innocent agents of the Time Variance Authority in gory cartoonish shots of CG gore splattering. He does this while dancing to NSYNC and miming sex acts, stroking a phallic femur he uses to stab an anonymous extra in the gut. Later, he’ll tearfully ask an alternate universe Wolverine to help him save his universe from destruction, since the villains plan to rip it apart after sending him to The Void, where other misfit Marvel castoffs sit around waiting for their cameos. Hard to reconcile those two modes—high-stakes exposition and flat displays of vulgarity and violence—especially when the finale also includes a bloody massacre of alternate Deadpools who are constantly torn apart and regenerated to get up and get dismembered again. Sounds a little clever in concept, but why they’re fighting, and who they’re fighting, never makes sense. They can live forever and exist in every universe. Why do we care about any of them? And the sequence is shot so dispassionately—in a steady, calm, monotonously paced tracking shot—with stunts digitally smoothed that it’s creepy in its total alienation from reality and consequence. Death doesn’t matter here, so what are we rooting for? That action beat starts when a character’s head explodes in a spray of bullets because Deadpool is holding him as a human shield, making jokes the whole time. Why should we care if his universe of supporting characters will survive when none of the other characters, or the movie itself, cares about life itself? It’s numbing in its senselessness.

To whipsaw between total adolescent depravity and painfully vacant sentiment almost sounds energetic. But I cannot overstate how deadly dull the movie is from scene to scene. It sparks to life in sputtering spurts, drifting off affection for other, better Marvel properties—from the retro-future TVA offices to previous X-Men finale Logan to appearances from surprise castmates. (One shot of an ersatz Avengers had me dreaming of such a misfit matchup in a better movie.) Director Shawn Levy can be a reliably anonymous technician. He previously pulled off a robot boxing movie with Jackson—2011’s Real Steel—to diverting results, and a video-game meta action comedy with Reynolds—2021’s Free Guy—to some crowd-pleasing effects. And he can traffic cop comic personas well enough in Night at the Museum. But here some combination of the dictates of Deadpool’s juvenile ugliness and the MCU’s polished anonymity, along with his typically flavorless direction, combines to make a broadly repellent mush. The screenplay flops along doing nothing, Jackson's innate Wolverine charisma tries to imbue literally anything of note in the downtime, and the bland images constantly undercut any sense of creativity or cleverness. 

The whole movie is oddly cheap and small, taking place almost entirely in an empty wasteland and on one city street. It says a lot about the movie’s mismanaged sense of its own expectations that it prefaces one particular action sequence with Deadpool asking the nerds to get ready for something awesome and then follows that promise with janky effects awkwardly filmed. The characters may be stranded in a Void, but to sit watching one limp scene after the next flail self-satisfied feels like its own particular purgatorial punishment. It makes constant reference to other perceived Marvel failures—X-Men Origins, a couple Fantastic Fours, Affleck’s Daredevil—and each time the smug superiority of this movie’s tone had me thinking we were too hard on those earlier efforts. At least they were trying to be real movies. Even flashbacks to the first Deadpool, a movie I hated at the time, and probably still would if I rewatched it, look like great cinema compared to this rot.

Game Theory: FREE GUY

Free Guy is nakedly manipulative nonsense pop filmmaking—but it works on its own terms. It helps that it’s not exactly the movie it appears to be at first. The picture opens in a video game, a combination of Fortnite and Grand Theft Auto in which we set our scene. Guy (Ryan Reynolds) tells us the rules. The sunglass wearers airdrop in to cause mayhem: carjackings, robberies, assassinations, and so on. They’re the players. Guy doesn’t know that. He’s just a Non-Player Character, a slave to the routine of his programming. One day he sees a pretty player (Jodie Comer) and falls in love. He has to know her. Along the way, he’ll learn he’s in a video game and tries to take control of his own destiny, code be damned. The problem here strikes me as the difficulty in caring about a character in a game. Remember when critics used to call bad CG spectacles “like watching someone else playing a video game?” That fell by the wayside lately, maybe because so many climaxes play that way, and maybe because Twitch and like have improbably proved a popular pastime among the younger crowd. Still, watching this phony world it is impossible to invest in the unreality. The concussive needle drops, busy heads-up displays, and loud gunfire have all the weight and impact of so many pixels. Then there’s Reynolds himself, who plays the guy like a human version of Emmett from The Lego Movie (down to the love of brand-nameless coffee) with his own particular brand of terminal insincerity melded to saccharine sentimentality. (What a strange blend of tones he’s been hawking in every role since Deadpool.) Luckily the movie uses this a jumping off point of an actual human story, turning its broad video game spoofery—with some fine nods toward violent games’ sociopathy and shallowness—into something a little more real.

I found myself relaxing into the movie’s artificial charms when it pretty early on reveals what it’s actually getting up to. It turns out Comer is, in real life, a coder who thinks the bestselling game’s designer (Taika Waititi) stole the work she and her partner (Joe Keery) did and used it as the basis of the open world software that made him rich. So she’s become a power player in hopes of uncovering proof for a lawsuit. Her unexpected realization? Her A.I. ideas might be what woke Guy from his routine. So the fake world is given some unexpected stakes—and it’s worth enjoying the lark when it might end up in actual real world consequences. There’s even some slight dancing around some Star Trek ethics of being, with the NPCs in the servers slowly dawning to their little riff on the allegory of the cave. (The movie is the junior high brain teaser to The Matrix’s grad school seminar.) The light gloss of corporate espionage cuts well against the empty quips on Reynolds’ side, and goes one step further into a secret (and only a little strained) rom-com buried under layers of genre elements. No matter how strange Reynolds is playing a proxy love interest for a totally predictable flesh-and-blood programmer, it somehow lands the emotional arc for Comer with some agreeable satisfaction.

Director Shawn Levy is nothing if not a consummate professional. He’s capable of sturdy big budget studio mechanics in ways we take for granted sometimes because he makes it look easy. With the likes of ensemble family comedy Cheaper by the Dozen and robot boxing drama Real Steel—two surprisingly satisfying efforts for which I have lingering affection—he’s proved he knows his way around hitting the right rousing beats with clean, legible throughlines and visual cohesion. There can be a charm to watching an oversized smooth shiny object of a big screen experience. Here Levy pushes a little too hard on pandering referentiality—does the ending really need two back-to-back overt references to its corporate sibling’s biggest sci-fi properties?—but stages some competent phony action. It takes the repetitive violence of video games and plays its mind-numbing senselessness for the shallowness it is. No wonder Guy, with his aw-shucks disbelief, wants more. The script finds a few good jokes here and there, and hooks into some ideas about games and modern life and creativity. (That Waititi is the mouthpiece for the movie’s swipes at corporate sequel culture is amusing, and ironic.) And in the end it’s somehow a little sweet and genuine in the midst of all its foolery. I still didn’t care about Reynold’s Guy and his computer friends, and didn’t entirely buy the ways the code of the game interacts with its makers, but sometimes when a movie plows ahead believing something so intently while making it the cornerstone of its emotional appeal, you just go with it.

Family Tries: THIS IS WHERE I LEAVE YOU

A family gathers in the shadow of their patriarch’s death, four grown children living under one upstate New York roof for one week at the behest of their mourning mother. “You can cry. You can laugh. There’s no right way to grieve,” the mom (played by Jane Fonda, carrying more dignity than the plot allows) says early in This is Where I Leave You, a movie that wants you to do a little laughing and a little crying. It’s a fairly contained and awfully schmaltzy comedy-tinged drama, completely predictable in the beats that it hits. Uptight jerks learn to loosen up. Irresponsible cads mature a bit. Generational gaps are bridged, but slightly. The grown kids have a prickly, but deep down loving, reunion that involves old grievances, new secrets, and a reason to rethink their lives’ trajectories. The film’s heart is in the right place.

The ensemble is filled with welcome faces, each an interesting presence in their own right. There’s Jason Bateman as the middle son, a man who loses his job and his wife on the same afternoon and arrives for the funeral convinced he won’t share his bad news. Of course that doesn’t happen. It’s a secret-spilling free-for-all. His sister (Tina Fey) is in a marriage in the process of chilling, so much so that her husband only lingers around two or three scenes, a total non-issue the rest of the time. She has an adorable kid or two, so that’s nice, except for the scene involving potty training gone wrong. That’s gross. Also back to sit shiva is their older brother (Corey Stoll). His wife (Kathryn Hahn) wants to get pregnant, a goal that drives her a little crazy in a condescending way. There’s also a younger brother (Adam Driver) and his cougar girlfriend (Connie Britton). Talk about a full house.

The ensemble is strong, if unevenly deployed in thin subplots. Bateman and Fey have good rapport, with similar clenched braininess that feels warmly familial. Stoll gets lost in the shuffle, but is a steady, mildly neurotic, rock, and Driver seems incapable of an uninteresting line reading. Mother Fonda gets lost in the sea of subplots for most of the film, drifting through as only a punchline for her oversharing and her boob job. She deserves better. They all do, really. Jonathan Tropper’s screenplay (based on his own novel) gives each family member their own little undercooked plots, complete with their own, largely separate, set of supporting characters (Rose Byrne, Ben Schwartz, Timothy Olyphant, Dax Shepard). None of them are all that interesting on their own, but collectively, it adds up to a passable amalgam of middle-aged concerns and family tensions.

Director Shawn Levy is an effective manipulator, able to execute material efficiently and professionally. I liked his robo-boxing movie Real Steel, and found small charms in his Cheaper by the Dozen remake, one-crazy-night comedy Date Night, and unfairly maligned flop The Internship. Those aren’t great movies, but at least they hit some good notes. With This is Where I Leave You, though, despite all the soft lighting, on-the-nose pop song choices, and sunny greeting-card encouragements, the movie never quiet achieves emotional lift it seeks.

I couldn’t help but wonder what a Robert Altman type would’ve done with this material, and not just because the family’s last name is Altman. With such a large, talented ensemble in a small location, a balanced approach with overlapping dialogue and thematic concerns might’ve worked better. Though certainly non-Altman family reunion films like August: Osage County and Dan in Real Life manage to hit similar notes with greater aplomb that Levy and Tropper’s work here. It’s bland and comfortable, but never really comes alive in any way. Still, for a superficial, sentimental, predictable little middle-of-the-road thing, it could be worse. 

Google Hangout: THE INTERNSHIP

The Internship is an amiable hangout movie. It’s little more than a chance to spend time with an appealing cast playing pleasant types. At the center of its appeal is the duo of Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, reteaming for the first time since their successful 2005 comedy Wedding Crashers. They’re both fast talkers, but where Vaughn muscles through with nonstop bravado, Wilson has a spacier syncopation. When both motormouths get up to speed, they find a fine, easy rhythm. This new comedy finds them surrounded by a capable cast that rises ever so slightly above glorified reaction shots in a plot that’s loose to put it generously. And yet I found myself enjoying sitting with this film much more than Crashers, which I’ve always found to be a tad on the grating side. I didn’t realize until I saw this one that my biggest problem with the earlier film was all that pesky plot. Sometimes a good, agreeable hangout is just what’s needed.

As the film begins, Vaughn and Wilson lose their jobs when the company they work for closes. Desperate to find better prospects, they bluff their way into summer internships at Google, where they quickly find themselves bewildered on the wrong side of a generation gap. The interns are placed into teams and the kids – a young manager (Josh Brener), a cute collegiate nerd (Tiya Sircar), a too-cool-for-school dude (Dylan O’Brien), and a self-conscious, socially awkward computer whiz (Tobit Raphael) – who get stuck with the old guys are none to happy about it. They’re an awkward bunch, but if you suspect they just might eventually, reluctantly learn to love each other and work as a team by using each member’s best skills you’d be on the right track. The team that wins the most points in various challenges over the summer, everything from coding to Quidditch, will win jobs at Google. Nods toward typical slobs (our protagonists) versus snobs (led by Max Minghella) plotting, as well as the basic competitive drive, make up the movie’s loose throughline.

It’s not often you find a light, summery comedy about how terrible the job market is. For a while, I remained unconvinced that it would work. But a funny thing happened as I sat there and let the movie play out: it won me over. The way the script by Vaughn and Jared Stern locates the anxieties of the two leads right inside the generation gap – they’re too young to ignore technology, too old to fully “get” it – becomes a somewhat productive dialogue. They grow progressively open-minded about younger people and new ways of doing things, while their teammates grow more open-minded about the value of input from people with more of an old school skill set. It’s a soft movie, but a few of the points it dances around are more perceptive than I anticipated. There’s a nice moment where Wilson and Vaughn chastise the younger interns for being so cynical about their future careers and when the response comes – “Do you even know what it’s like to be 21 today?” with a college degree no longer guaranteeing a job, if it ever was – they’re actually taken aback and consider it.

None of this would work without the cast. Director Shawn Levy, of Cheaper by the Dozen and Date Night, keeps the scenes casual and sociable, letting the ensemble fall into comfortable grooves to fill the scripted sequences with a bit of a loose feeling. Vaughn and Wilson have a relaxed chemistry that’s very appealing. Various supporting roles filled by the likes of Rose Byrne, Aasif Mandvi, and Josh Gad are fine bits of color around the edges. I was most taken with the work of O’Brien and Sircar, two of the college-aged interns who spar and banter with the main guys. Their winning performances are charming and feel like they’re circling some sort of generational truth, mediating their experience through smart phones and admitting to a technologically enabled imagination that’s wilder and more experienced than their real world lives to date.

This isn’t anything great, but it’s sweeter than expected. It’s refreshing to find a big studio comedy that’s just plain nice. (It’s also likely the only Hollywood comedy you’ll see in some time to purposefully allude to a Langston Hughes poem.) The movie hates jerks, lets characters feel bad about bad decisions, and angles for encouragement and hope above all else. It’s miles more humane and watchable than Ted or The Hangover Part II or any other corrosive-yet-popular comedy of the past several years. If this core decency leads the film into its biggest misstep, so be it. The approach to its setting feels miscalculated, so dewy-eyed about how great it is to work at Google – just shy of Wonka in the whimsy department, if the production design filled with pedal-powered conference tables and nap pods is to be believed – that it shoots past elaborate product placement and ends up feeling like it’s having a goof. Still, this is a movie that’s enjoyable to be around. Simply spending time together may not actually solve generation gaps, but it’s nice to think so for a couple hours.

Rock 'Em Sock 'Em: REAL STEEL

Real Steel takes place in a time in the near future, a mere fourteen years from now, when boxing will become a sport of the past. Because of an ever increasing audience demand for carnage and destruction – the boxing equivalent of going to NASCAR for the crashes – and because of leaps and bounds in the field of robotics, boxing will be a sport for souped-up humanoid robots, controlled by their owners to beat each other until sparks and oil splatter all over the ropes. This is miles from Robot Wars a TV show from about a decade ago that sent what were essentially Roombas with rotary saws crashing into each other. The boxing of Real Steel is boxing as we know it today with the same rules and the same rings, but the athletes have gone the way of the factory worker. Instead of testing the limits of the human body, robot boxing tests the limits of cold, hard steel. It’s a wonder the crowds at these events aren’t wearing earplugs.

The film follows a down-on-his-luck, debt-burdened robot manager (Hugh Jackman) who just can’t catch a break. In the opening scene, he pulls up to a small town fair where he’s hoping to make a little money by pitting his fighter against a bull and wagering a sizable sum with the event’s promoters. Minutes later, his robot’s impaled by a horn and scattered across the arena. The promoters expect him to pay up so he skips town. As he’s escaping, he receives word that his old girlfriend has died, which leaves the eleven-year-old son (Dakota Goyo) he’s never met in need of a guardian. Pulling up to the courthouse, he convinces his ex’s sister (Hope Davis) to give him a few months with his son, just for the summer.

This seems like two disparate plotlines, but they’re drawn together when the boy shows a talent for helping his dad, and his dad’s robo-gym landlord (Evangeline Lilly), work to get their robots in fighting shape. (It’s explained away with an off-handed reference to video games, ‘cause kids like those, right?) So the working-poor underdog, a former human pugilist who has found his talent displaced and unexploited, struggling to make ends meet and turn his life around, is encouraged by his son to try one last time to make a go of robot boxing. It’s not too subtle, but I liked how the robots become metaphors through which the father and son work out their individual problems and eventually bond. But the old fighting robot has been rendered unusable by a bull’s goring, so first they need to find a ‘bot. Then, they need to get him to fight with the best of them.

It’s a testament to the power of clichés done right that the film works so well. The two appealing performances from the leads ground the proceedings in a nice, heightened Hollywood approximation of human emotion. Jackman, with plenty of big star-power charisma, and Goyo, with engaging boyish energy, play off each other well. The remarkable blend of practical and digital effects works well for the robots. The believable blending between the worlds of man and machine creates a reasonably credible, if more than a little silly, sci-fi world for what is essentially a standard boxing movie.

The movie’s screenplay comes from John Gatins who has two baseball movies, one basketball movie, and a horseracing movie to his credit. He knows just the path to set the movie on and piles up the conflict in the usual ways. The underestimated little robot the father-son duo finds, fixes, and trains works his way up the ranks. They start in gritty underground matches played against scary punks with no rules in roadside bars, dark clubs and back-alley warehouses, before they fight their way into higher stakes and bigger money. In solid sports movie fashion, the stakes grow as we charge forward to the Big Fight with a popular, scary champion with boo-worthy corporate backers. Each new match makes the widescreen spectacle all the more eye-catching with massive crowds, large stadiums, and plenty of neon lighting and pounding bass. It may be a bit predictable (when it comes to figuring out where this goes, do you need a roadmap?) but it’s also enjoyable. I found the matches just as, if not more, thrilling and involving as any of the fights in last year’s Oscar-winning boxing movie The Fighter.

The sci-fi specifics may be a little fuzzy, the characters archetypes, and the plot a compilation of sports film’s greatest moments, but Real Steel is a big pleasing popcorn movie. It’s loud and kind of dumb, but it’s also appealing, exciting, and more or less satisfying. Director Shawn Levy, he of the Cheaper by the Dozen and Pink Panther remakes and two Night at the Museum movies, has stepped out of his (bad) family-comedy comfort zone to make a comfortable big budget picture. With its warm father-son dynamic and surprisingly convincing robot effects deployed for a sturdy formula adequately told, the film has a pleasant feel. The look is glossy and confident. The pace is brisk but deliberate yet exciting. It’s a fun entertainment machine, an enjoyable couple of hours that tells a story through robots beating the living steel out of each other for characters I cared about. 

DATE NIGHT: It's a Date!

Date Night is what we tell ourselves Hollywood used to create more consistently. It’s a high concept blockbuster with big stars and a big budget. It’s an action-comedy that’s genuinely exciting and more than a little funny. It moves at a fast pace with a light touch. It’s a perfectly enjoyable night at the movies, even though, as it was winding down, I found myself mildly disappointed that it wasn’t just a little bit better.

After all, the movie stars two of the funniest people working today. Steve Carell and Tina Fey play a married couple whose weekly date night takes a screwball turn when a case of mistaken identity turns their night into a wacky and dangerous race through New York City in order to stay alive and clear up the misunderstandings. Their madcap adventure contains plenty of capably staged action and plenty of laughs. They come into contact with a host of funny characters who are played by a host of funny, talented performers. There’s a hunky security expert (Mark Wahlberg), a mob boss (Ray Liotta), a policewoman (Taraji P. Henson), two shady tough-guys (Common and Jimmi Simpson), and a couple of goofy lowlifes (James Franco and Mila Kunis) who are the real couple that should be at the center of the mess. Needless to say, Carell and Fey are far removed from their suburban-family existence and their circle of friends (which include the always welcome Kristen Wiig and Mark Ruffalo).

Carell and Fey have enjoyable presences on funny sitcoms (The Office and 30 Rock, respectively) and here create an easy rapport. They seem like a real married couple. They have complications and frustrations, sure, but they seem to truly love each other. And when the action movie kicks in, they don’t discover hidden depths in each other, or suddenly become butt-kicking action superstars. Their relationship is a little touching and sweet as their characters remain consistent throughout: likable and relatable. With lesser leads, the movie would be nowhere near as good, even with the excellent supporting cast that has been assembled.

Certainly, the story would not be as memorable if it weren’t for the people acting it out. The plot keeps a lot of thriller and screwball elements in the air, and there’s a feeling that it doesn’t ever develop the ideas more than the plot requires. But what a plot! I’m sure there are plot holes. It’s not complicated, or even particularly distinguished, but it’s certainly enjoyable and involving as it sends the characters racing through ridiculous scenarios and it managed to keep me smiling and chuckling for almost the entire run time. Sure, it retroactively bothers me that the underlying theme about marriage is never fully explored and that the great supporting cast is seriously underused. But the movie was fun enough at the time.

The director is Shawn Levy who ruinously remade The Pink Panther and wasted a perfectly good premise in not one but two Night at the Museum movies. Here, he finally makes a movie that works all the way through. It’s a film that’s energetic without seeming manic while funny without seeming to stretch for laughs. The timing is excellent, the leads are well-deployed, and it doesn’t overstay its welcome. In fact, it all seems to resolve too easily and quickly. If anything, I wanted the movie to go on a little longer. There needs to be just one more turn of the screw, one more unexpected complication. The plot resolves a bit too quickly and easily. Then again, I should be careful what I wish for. This is just an easy, uncomplicated, and enjoyable experience. It's a fun, slick entertainment that’s, at the risk of sounding too willing to be quoted, just right for date night.

Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (2009)

The first Night at the Museum was a dull, sad experience as it was nothing less than a feature-length death of a great concept, killed by neglect. Sure, Ben Stiller stood amiably in the center of crazy CGI gewgaws as New York City’s Museum of Natural History came to life after nightfall, but it was repetitive, never clever, and just plain boring. It was a tacky mess of bad jokes and unearned sentiment, but it made a lot of money so here we are with Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. In this new picture, there are some nice visual moments and some genuinely funny moments, but it’s also louder, longer, and more nonsensical and unnecessary than last time.

This time around, Stiller follows most of the characters from the first movie (including a monkey, Owen Wilson and Steve Coogan) to the Smithsonian where they are being terrorized at night by a very mean ancient Egyptian pharaoh. Hank Azaria is very funny as the pharaoh. He steps through his scenes with a goofy, lisping accent and speaks through it with such oddball intensity, that I couldn’t help but be amused. Unfortunately, he’s the villain, and I just couldn’t take him seriously as a threat. At one point he takes one of our wax-figure heroes and threatens to bury the figure in sand if Stiller doesn’t do as he’s told. So off Stiller goes, worrying about this wax figure and all I could think was: he’s a wax figure! He won’t suffocate! This led me into a larger, more fundamental problem I was having with the movie. I didn’t understand why we were supposed to care about these statues and figurines. Just because they can move and talk doesn’t make them human. Why does Stiller care and why should I? This sort of thing can really work (see: the Toy Story films) but here is a sad, sorry case of botched anthropomorphism.

There’s a host of very funny people here, too, but they don’t have time to create anything really funny as they just dash about, shouting a line or two here and there. Amy Adams is her usual brand of charming as an Amelia Earhart statue that struts through the picture spitting out roughly 30s-style screwball-comedy lines. Christopher Guest and Bill Hader have some funny moments as Ivan the Terrible and General Custer, respectively. Jonah Hill, Mindy Kaling, and Ricky Gervais, as well as the Jonas brothers as singing cherubs, each get a brief scene to shine, but too much of the movie is given over to a totally bland Ben Stiller performance and uninspired plotting that sends characters everywhere and nowhere at the same time while seeming to change its fantasy rules whenever it suits the filmmakers. Early on, much is made of the Egyptian tablet that causes the museum to come to life, and yet (little spoiler) the Smithsonian creatures stay very much alive when Stiller flies off at the end with tablet in hand.

This thing is a mess, woefully inconsistent, chaotic, and overlong. I laughed a little, and found some of the visual tricks clever (there’s a neat moment involving a hall of artwork), but even for lightweight summer entertainment this is junky and ill conceived, an uncalled for expansion of a what was a poor property to begin with. At times, when I lost myself in laughter at Azaria's performance, I could almost forgive the movie. But every time I stopped laughing, I crashed back into reality, wondering when the movie would ever end. And yet, I still think the idea of all the things in a museum coming to life is a great concept, just not in the hands of the people who've been inflicting these upon us.