I highly enjoyed the first installment of this sequel and was hoping to enjoy, for entertainment purposes, the Smithsonian version; but unfortunately I found it uneven with some of the magic lost to lengthy very dumb sequences especially with the Kahmunrah character, but also with Napoleon and Ivan the Terrible. Still I believe that the transition from New York City to Washington was really well done, as well as Ben Stiller character success story that gave permission to a nice movie finale.
One of the good things the first Museum movie had was great characters performed by Robin Williams, Owen Wilson, Ricky Gervais and Patrick Gallagher. All of them are back but their roles are totally diminished to the smallest possible time to allow new characters that were not performed and developed as interesting as their counterparts in the first installment. Still here we have great special effects and one that particularly impressed me is when they go into the famous V–J day in Times Square photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt as is visually outstanding as the black and white change is spectacular… well, at least more than having the Capone era characters in b/w while the rest is in color.
As happens with sequels some like better the first installment, some like both and some like better the second one. Me, I enjoyed a lot more the first for the story, characters and total magic. But I know that you readers will fall into any of the three possibilities and well, is a movie that you can watch for the fun of watching pure family entertainment cinema. Still I’ll suggest you to watch it for the scenes with good visual effects.
