Night at the Museum

Shawn Levy’s film comes from a thirty two page children’s picture book. Milan Trenc’s 1993 volume supplies the premise and nothing else; everything beyond it was invented for the screenplay. That is why the narrative moves like a museum tour rather than a plot, handing you a new hall, a new exhibit and a new bit of business every ten minutes, and it explains why the running time is held together so loosely. The museum you watch is not the real one either. Exteriors were filmed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, but the interiors are a studio set built in Burnaby, in Canada. That is exactly why the film can trash the halls: the collisions and chases would be impossible inside a working museum, and they exist by permission of the set rather than of the institution. Its behaviour at the box office is worth noting too. The picture took more in its second weekend than in its opening one, a curve that belongs to family titles carried by word of mouth, and that alone says who it was built for. Right for an adult putting something on with a child that entertains scene by scene. Wrong for a viewer who expects historical figures to behave like their own periods.