With technological advancements the local museum in Brooklyn is getting upgraded and all the old exhibits are being shipped off to the National Archives, i.e. the Smithsonian Museum. Larry Daley [Ben Stiller] has moved on in his life and become a successful businessman designing products but he misses the job he had as the night guard. After the exhibits from the museum have been shipped off to be archived at the Smithsonian Museum Larry goes to save them from trouble and meets up with more historical figures that comes to life.

This movie is nothing but family fun and I love that. The movie doesn’t try to be anything more than that and that is something that I don’t find very often nowadays. Most of the movies always have too many subplots or some underlying themes that they try way too hard to unfold and then when they fail to do so make you only disappointed in the complete product. This movie on the other hand works perfectly as an enjoyable family friendly movie.

The biggest element of this movie is the variety of historical characters that the movie brings to life. Some of those new characters are Amelia Earheart [Amy Adams], General Custer [Bill Hader], Ivan the Terrible [Christopher Guest] and Kahmunrah [Hank Azaria]. I’m still not sure whether my favourite of the new role is General Custer or Amelia Earheart. Amelia got a lot of screen time and a lot more story, not to mention how beautiful I think she is, but Custer was great as well, as Bill Hader always is, every moment he had on screen. One of my favourite moments had to be General Custer attempting to think of a plan while he was captured by the enemy, I couldn’t stop laughing at Hader’s hilarious style of comedy.

I can’t talk about this movie without mentioning all the returning characters that I still love from the first film. Characters like Jedediah [Owen Wilson] and Octavius [Steve Coogan] as the great duo of miniature warriors that think they can take on the world. Theodore Roosevelt [Robin Williams] got a small part in this film but still got a few good laughs in.

I think the charm of this movie comes from the easily accessible adventure that it is. The one worry I had for this movie was that the way the film reintroduces Ben’s character and his current situation. It made it difficult to conceive of how he would end up back at the museum. He’s now in this great paying job where he is inventing things and finally having all his business ideas that we saw him talk about at the beginning of the first film. However, the writers did well to get the character where we want him, which is in the museum, with little effort.

One interesting aspect that I did not know about before heading to the theatre is that the screenplay was written by Reno 911 creators, stars and writers Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant. This movie just got more hilarious just by association I think. Reno 911 is one of the most out there comedies I’ve seen in a while. I don’t follow it religiously but what’ve seen is ridiculous and I love most film roles that Thomas Lennon does.

Overall I think this is a good movie to take the children to or go yourself if you’re looking for a light hearted comedy. I can tell you that there were numerous children in my theatre and they all seemed to be enjoying the movie intensely.

IMDb says 6.0/10

Rotten Tomatoes says 43%

I say 7.0/10