Night At The Museum 2

** (PG)Director: Shawn Levy.Cast: Ben Stiller, Hank Azaria, Amy Adams, Owen Wilson, Steve Coogan, Robin Williams, Christopher Guest.LIKE many sequels, Night At The Museum 2 goes for a bigger, louder, more-ish approach. There's a bigger museum to run amok in after-hours, an extra extensive array of special effects and more characters to provide the bits in between.But at the end of the night, NATM2 isn't any better. Just as the first film was a family-friendly gimmick-fest with a story that was flimsy at best, the sequel is just the same, with a disappointing laugh quota and a surprisingly scant amount of story.Stiller returns as Larry Daley, who is now the head of his own inventions company Daley Devices.Unhappy in his work, Larry randomly drops in on his old haunt of the Museum Of Natural History to find his old buddies from the first movie are being put into storage at the Smithsonian.As expected, trouble arises when the tablet that brings the artifacts to life is taken with them and Larry must come to the rescue, going head-to-head with evil pharoah Kahmunrah (Azaria) and a host of baddies.Part-advertisement for the Smithsonian, part-history lesson, NATM2 tries hard to be a well-rounded family experience but falls well short.Yes, the special effects sequences are great, including a giant octopus, the flight of the Kitty Hawk and a giant arse-kicking Abraham Lincoln, but the story in between is slim.In fact, it's almost a retread of the first film, as characters do battle over the Egyptian tablet that brings all the characters to life, with wacky shenanigans involving historical figures speckled throughout the film.They probably go a little overboard with historical figures - on top of Theodore Roosevelt and Attila The Hun from the last movie, we get Amelia Earhart, Ivan The Terrible, Al Capone, Napoleon Bonaparte, the Tuskagee Airmen, General Custer, Abraham Lincoln, the Wright Brothers, Albert Einstein and objects such as Rodin's The Thinker, a few paintings and some cupids thrown into the mix.There's little room for a proper story other than Kahmunrah's plan to use the table to raise an undead army, and the central theme of "doing what makes you happy is more important than making money" will likely go over the children's heads.This is disappointing because after all, this is aimed at kids.The jokes are mainly child level, including monkeys slapping Stiller and some lame goofing by the stars. Given the cast includes Stiller, Azaria, Guest, Wilson, Coogan, Williams and Ricky Gervais, you'd expect enough laughs to fill a dozen movies.Having said all that, it's not a total loss. Kid's will be amused and you'd hope they'd come out of the movie with a desire to learn more about Earheart, Lincoln, the Tuskagee Airmen or even the Smithsonian, which can only be a good thing.Azaria also does his best to save the film, delivering the funniest lines with his lisping British-sounding pharoah and trying to enliven Stiller, who is either bored or Botoxed beyond belief (it's hard to tell the difference).The effects are good too, and the movie's sporadic burst of fun will keep even the most cynical adults briefly entertained.But NATM2 falls into the trap of many sequels - bigger is not better, louder is not better and having more of everything does not make it better.