Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian – Blu-ray Review

The Film

Say what you want about the first Night at the Museum, but I found it both humorous and a fairly creative way to do a little superficial education for the younger crowd. The writing team of Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon continue this style while also adding a few more subtle laughs for older audiences in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian.

The cast, from the onset, appears like the producers wanted a hit regardless of the actual plot. Comedians Ben Stiller, Robin Williams, Owen Wilson, and Steve Coogan reprise their previous roles while joined by Hank Azaria, Christopher Guest, and Bill Hader. They each get their own little spots to do what they do best. Despite the overwhelming cast, I have to give it to Amy Adams; she steals the show as the scarlet-haired Amelia Earhart.

At least that was up until the story takes them into the Smithsonian’s Museum of Art. The art they chose to come to life couldn’t be any better, with a famous photo being an important part to the story. The incorporation of the museum was substantially more in-depth in comparison to the first one, while not being too gimmicky with the fact that the entire museum comes to life, only focusing on a few areas. Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian has a lot of features of a time-traveling movie without the pesky Space-Time Continuum interfering.

On the down side, one of my bigger complaints is the lack of development in Custer (Hader) for the majority of the movie. He does a good job of portraying Custer, but there are a few scenes which feel almost forced, with no real progression of the story line. Also, the carried-over characters from the first movie to the second one that serve no purpose are a little out-of-place and feel like random breaks, but the overall pacing of this movie has improved vastly over the first Night at the Museum. Two glaring flaws come at the end of the movie, but the fun from the rest of the film let me suspend the disbelief for the few minutes remaining.

Overall, I thought the movie was an improvement over the first. Pacing, plot, and story depth were a lot more even and developed, while keeping the fun, museum-loving nerd in all of us entertained for 105 minutes.

The Blu-ray

Audio/Video

The audio was pretty good, but couldn’t touch the beautiful picture. The colors on the 1080p transfer were beautiful and crisp detail really made this flick look amazing.

Special Features

Commentary: The track with director Shawn Levy wasn’t awesome but contained some interesting snippets of information, and the track by the film’s writers was pretty much the same. If your a huge fan of this franchise then they are worth checking out, but if not, you might want to scan through them.

Deleted Scenes: There are 12 deleted scenes including an alternate ending and all of them have commentary tracks with Shawn Levy. I’m not usually a fan of these, but there were a few that stood out and made this feature worth it.

Curators of Comedy: Behind the Scenes: I enjoyed this feature, but not as much as some behind-the-scenes featurettes. This one was more of a nice interview session, enjoyable but not what I was looking for.

Historical Confessions: Famous Last Words: The characters from the film are given a chance to speak one last time. I enjoyed this feature more than I was expecting, it’s definitely worth checking out.

Phinding Pharaoh: Hank Azeria elaborates on exactly how he came up with the Pharaoh character.

Scavenger Hunt Mode: This solid trivia track offers two different difficulty levels for the viewer to challenge themselves. I had fun with this feature, and I’m sure it’ll go over well with like minded trivia fans.

There are a ton more features on this disc including, Trailers, Gag Reel, and more! Also included is a standard DVD copy and Digital copy of the film.

The Film: Rating:

The Blu-ray: Rating: