BEFORE: Zachary Levi carries over again from "Shazam! Fury of the Gods", and here are the links that I think will get me through the month of June: Chris Parnell, Zazie Beetz, Channing Tatum, Ethan Suplee, Ben Affleck, Christopher Lloyd, Audra McDonald, Forest Whitaker, Terry Crews, Adam Sandler, Adeel Akhtar, Henry Cavill, Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Woody Harrelson, Harris Dickinson, Garret Dillahunt, and Seann William Scott. That's only 18 people, I know, but it's still going to be a full month of films, and by the end of it I hope to have some idea of how I'm going to get from July 4 to October 1.
I have to work at two major film festivals this month, starting today, but once I hit the middle of the month, my schedule's going to clear up because the movie theater's going to shut down for repairs - I built up a cushion in my bank account with all the hours I worked in May, but I still think I should find a temp job for late summer, or else maybe I need to go back on the dole. We'll see, but I can't just sit around at home again for four days a week, I'll go nuts.
It's the first day of Pride Month, and also Asian-American/Pacific Islander Heritage month - I think I maybe covered that yesterday with the "Shazam!" sequel, one character in the foster family came out and another one was Asian, so there you go. I may not have anything else that fits in thematically, because this month was designed to be mostly about dads and grads. Tonight's film has a teen taking over his father's job and also he's a high-school student, so it fits both of those themes. Tomorrow, another high-school set film, and of course, several more father-oriented films are on the docket between now and June 18.
THE PLOT: Nick Daley hesitates becoming a museum night guard and Kahmunrah returns to conquer the world.
AFTER: I'd like to figure out how this one came to be, because it's an animated knock-off of a very popular live-action (with effects, of course) franchise. WHY? and HOW? WTF? Did some production company try to turn this into a Disney series, and create this as a pilot, only to discover that it didn't really work? Or was this a proposed script for "Night at the Museum 4" that couldn't be made during the pandemic, so somebody figured, "Eh, we'll just hire a bunch of animators and they can all work from home..." Did they plan this and then find out later that Ben Stiller wasn't available, neither was Owen Wilson or Steve Coogan, plus Robin Williams is dead, so they figured, "OK, we'll just pivot and make this an animated film, and we'll cast a bunch of sound-alikes..." Very curious, indeed.
So I wonder what the casting process was like. Of course, if you can get Tom Lennon, you get Tom Lennon, because he's got a great voice and he also co-wrote the screenplay for the original "Night at the Museum" film. But are they saying that if you can't get Owen Wilson, then Steve Zahn is an acceptable substitute? Does Zachary Levi sound enough like Ben Stiller to be an acceptable stand-in? It's all very suspect in the world of animation voice-overs, I think.
Ah, the IMDB trivia section gives me some insight - this was rumored to be a potential pilot for an animated series, but also the franchise is something that Disney acquired from Fox, they bought 20th Century Studios in 2019 and this came along for the ride, so I guess it's "Hey, we're Disney, how do we turn this into an animated movie or series that we can then someday do a live-action re-boot of?" Regardless of how you feel about Disney, they are a giant mega-corp that will someday own everything, the acquisition of Fox Studios is just one example, before that it was Marvel and all of its properties and subsidiaries, that sort of worked out very well, but here with "Night at the Museum", not so much, because this film is just terrible.
I mean, I get it, if you want the action to move to ancient Egypt, then animation is probably the way to go - this way you don't have to build a whole ancient city, you can just have artists draw it, and the cartoony style is OK, because that's just a way to go. But story-wise, this film doesn't even come CLOSE to having the same sense of wonder and charm that the other films in the franchise had. Instead they chose to focus on Nick Daley, the high-school age son of Ben Stiller's character, who is wracked with self-doubt and teen angst and second guesses himself at every turn. Don't get me wrong, he fits in quite well with all the self-sabotaging main characters seen here at the Movie Year in the past few weeks, but I'm getting pretty sick of screenwriters falling back on this as a quick way to connect with the audience. And it's very specific, too, Nick can chat up a female classmate, but he can't quite ask for a date. He's willing to audition for jazz band, even if they DON'T really need a D.J., but he'll find a way to blow the audition by either being clumsy or too unsure of himself to press the right buttons.
And don't get me STARTED on how he can't use chopsticks - this is like 5 minutes of the film, eating sushi with his father and completely blowing the chopstick usage. Well, it's not exactly like you can just ASK somebody how to use them. Oh wait, of course you can. Or since you're a millennial teen, I guess you could just watch a YouTube or TikTok video about the proper way to hold them? But no, instead he holds them perpendicular to each other, and the piece of sushi goes flying over to the next table and lands in somebody's water glass. The next piece ends up on the floor and a waiter slips on it - you know, even a capuchin monkey would figure out pretty quickly that you could just spear the piece of sushi with one chopstick and get it into your mouth that way. Or, you could also ask the waiter for a fork, or here's a crazy idea if you can't master chopsticks, maybe just pick up the sushi with your fingers? It's not hard, so why does the movie waste five minutes on this? Because that's five less minutes of story that someone has to write.
It's another narrative shortcut that the non-living (undead?) historical figures like Teddy Roosevelt and Sacagawea explicitly suggest that Nick take over for his father - and this also conveniently explains why they set out to scare and torture every new security guard who ISN'T Nick, I guess because they think that eventually if they scare every new candidate for the job, then they'll get to see Nick again? Lazy writing, that's all it is. And then they bring back Kahmunrah, who we all saw get banished to the underworld in the 2nd film, how is he back again?
While we're on the subject of continuity, the second film in the franchise, "Battle of the Smithsonian" had Larry Daley extending the visiting hours at the Natural History Museum to nighttime, so that guests could interact with the living exhibits - of course, they assumed the moving figures were hired actors, and the moving dinosaur skeleton was animatronic. And then in the third film, Tilly from the British Museum brought the magic Egyptian tablet back to New York, and showed Dr. McPhee, Larry's boss, how it brought the exhibits to life. So in this film, how does McPhee NOT KNOW the secret, when he learned it in the previous film? They just threw all this aside and told a new story that doesn't link up with the other episodes, unless this is somehow set between the second film and "Secret of the Tomb", but then of course, that doesn't really make any sense, either.
Then the story is essentially one big chase scene, as Nick teams up with Roosevelt, Sacajawea, Joan of Arc, Laaa the Neanderthal and the tiny cowboy and tiny Roman soldier to follow Kahmunrah through ancient Egypt - and they got there because the tablet was brought to the Metropolis Art Museum, and somehow turned every painting there into a potential portal, which wasn't even on record as being a thing the tablet could do. But hey, I guess the Tablet of Akhmenrah can do whatever the screenwriter says it can do...
Also starring the voices of Joshua Bassett, Jamie Demetriou (last seen in "The Electrical Life of Louis Wain"), Gillian Jacobs (last seen in "Life Partners"), Shelby Simmons, Tenzing Norgay Trainor, Lidia Porto (last seen in "Horrible Bosses 2"), Bowen Yang (last seen in "The Lost City"), Thomas Lennon (last seen in "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story"), Alice Isaaz, Jack Whitehall (last seen in "The Nutcracker and the Four Realms"), Steve Zahn (last seen in "The Object of My Affection"), Joseph Kamal, Alexander Salamat, Kieran Sequoia, Akmal Saleh, Chris Parnell (last seen in "Val"), Dee Bradley Baker (last heard in "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings"), Kelemete Misipeka, Jonathan Roumie, Zeeko Zaki, Jim Conroy (last heard in "Rio 2"), Christie Bahna, Stoney Emshwiller
RATING: 4 out of 10 candy bars in the vending machine
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