Night at the Museum: Kahmunrah Rises Again

I suppose the idea of picking up from the trilogy after eight years might have made sense on a storyboard somewhere, but this rather lacklustre animation really just reminded me of a feature-length episode of "Scooby Do" - only with a Pharaoh. This time it's son "Nick" who becomes the nightwatchman just in time to thwart the ambitions of "Kahmunrah" to re-emerge from his tomb and take over the world. Yep, it's that predictable - and sadly this animated story offers us really very little by way of originality, basically rehashing the second film from the franchise (2009) but in cartoon form. To be fair, it doesn't hang around and maybe a new audience might appreciate it, but it's completely devoid of menace or comedy and is something you can plonk your kids in front of safe in the knowledge that they could probably watch it again next week and not remember a thing.

No redeeming qualities. <em>'Night at the Museum: Kahmunrah Rises Again'</em> is sequelitis in a nutshell. It only holds the bare minimum of similarities to the original trilogy, with no main cast member from those movies returning. Even at just under 90 minutes, it's a mind-numbingly dull watch. The choice of animation is iffy, too. I will say I could see youngsters enjoying this as a standalone film, to be honest it has the makings of being a television show - which is the avenue they should've gone down instead, could've made it <em>'What's New, Scooby-Doo?'</em>-esque. The lack of any real connection to the preceding movies then wouldn't actually matter as it'd be a different thing entirely, but given it is a sequel you have to compare it to its predecessors. I obviously wasn't expecting this to be anything quite as enjoyable as the Ben Stiller pictures, though I did think it would at least resemble the other flicks a little bit. Oh well, no biggie.