With Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, there seems to be two warring camps — similar to the Romans and the Cowboys in the first movie.

On the one hand, you have the critics who find the sequel as good or better than what they thought of the original, and that it’s a good, fun family film. On the other, you have those who think the second Night falls flat on its face.

Hence, on both Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, you have middling scores — 60 for Metacritic, 48% for RT.

In the “we like it” camp are:

• Ed Potton of The London Times, who enjoys Night‘s inventiveness: “Such a retread would have been shameless were it not for the chutzpah with which (director Shawn) Levy and his crew plunder the riches of the Smithsonian.”

• Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly, who knows it’s supposed to be light and silly: “This is what you call a wholesome kiddie movie on drugs.”

In the “we’d rather do something, anything else than see this again” camp:

• MSNBC’s Alonso Duralde, who’s astonished by the film’s wasted opportunity: “How can one movie contain Ricky Gervais, Hank Azaria, Steve Coogan, Amy Adams, Christopher Guest, Bill Hader, Mindy Kaling, Jay Baruchel and Craig Robinson while offering so very little in the way of laughs?”

• Hollywood & Fine’s Marshall Fine, who takes aim at one person: “As of now, the scariest four words in the English language are officially ‘A Shawn Levy Film.’ ”

(And that’s not the nastiest thing Fine said about Levy. Dude, did he do something to you?)

Here’s the trailer:

Other movies out locally this week:

Rudo y Cursi: The Mexican soccer movie stars Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna as brothers who play for the local team and have to deal with their own demons. Most critics found it pretty good, scoring above-average ratings on both Metacritic and RT. The Houston Chronicle’s Amy Biancolli said “There are plenty of kicks” (I see what you did there. Ha.) and Slate’s Dana Stevens says “Carlos Cuarón’s screenplay is rambling and unstructured but full of vibrant dialogue.”.

Revanche: Goetz Spielmann’s Oscar-nominated film seems to bring out the scholarly side of some critics. Take The New York Times’ A.O. Scott: “A tidy, glum thriller that aims for a tone of sour humanism, perched just on the near edge of cynical despair.” Makes it sound like Proust. Actually, Spielmann’s movie sounds a solid feature that has some great, riveting scenes, and critics were pretty universal with their praise.

Katyn: Andrzej Wajda’s film about the Soviet massacre of 15,000 Polish officers in 1940 also stirred a great majority of critics. “Some sequences sear the mind,” said The Hollywood Reporter’s Kirk Honeycutt.

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• Rudo y Cursi an entertaining return to form (northbynorthwestern.com)

Even Ben Stiller looks bored out of his mind in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, and he got paid several million dollars to star in it. Sitting through the movie puts you in a similar state of mind, except you’re the one paying the money.

Not that we’re singling Stiller out. Pretty much no one involved with this listless, rote sequel to the 2006 smash hit seems to have put much effort into it. After all, the original made half a billion dollars at the box office the world over. With numbers like that, a built-in audience for a sequel is guaranteed to line up on opening weekend.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Not since Charlton Heston told a “dirty ape” what to do with his stinking paws has an actor been so tormented by a monkey.

While not exactly the kind of abject captivity that Heston endured in “Planet of the Apes,” the slapping match Ben Stiller went through with Crystal, the Capuchin monkey — for a second time — was torture enough.

“I really dislike the monkey,” Stiller said during an interview with co-stars Hank Azaria and Amy Adams at the Smithsonian Castle in Washington, where some of Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian was filmed.

“There’s no way to feel great about having a monkey slap your face on any level,” Stiller continued, adding that the trainer would be off-camera shouting “Get him! Get him! Hit him harder! Hit him harder! And then they give it a treat.”

Azaria could tell Stiller was dreading the scene because he arrived on the set “despondent.”

“I’ve never seen you so sad that day and nothing could cajole you out of it,” Azaria told Stiller. “It was really the depths of depression over ‘monkey day.’”

“‘Monkey day’ is never a good day,” Stiller replied. “You start to question your life and your career.”

Stiller says it was a much better being slapped by Adams in the movie because “there’s a kiss that comes before and after.”

Adams says that was the one scene that made her laugh so hard she ruined take after take, which meant “we had to start over and I was slapping and laughing and kissing and laughing” (which Stiller quipped “happens a lot in my marriage”).

While Adams and Azaria say they loved playing with the monkey on their own, they weren’t without their own complaints: Both hated their wardrobe.

As Egyptian ruler Kahmunrah, Azaria wears a tunic that other characters ridicule throughout the film as a skirt. Azaria says “it was highly uncomfortable, very binding,” which prevented him from being able to sit down. They also gave him a codpiece that was stuffed with cardboard and metal to make it bigger, but more painful.

His headdress started out as metal and Azaria says it “weighed more than the table we’re sitting at now.” The crew had to keep redesigning it to make it lighter.

Adams, who played aviator Amelia Earhart, had to contend with the crew redesigning her jodhpurs so they’d be tighter and tighter. She says the breeches were made of wool with “absolutely no stretch,” which made them hard to run in, adding that she “ripped more than one pair in the back.”

Despite the suffering, Stiller’s character, museum guard Larry Daley, still learned the key to happiness by the end of the movie: friendship, not money.

Stiller’s personal key to happiness?

“Sugar and being in the moment and maybe just a little bit of alcohol.”

Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian opens nationwide Friday.

WASHINGTON (AP) — What happens after dark in the halls of a museum? A few lucky kids will get to find out in the months ahead, thanks to some big promotions and travel deals drawing on the buzz of Hollywood’s new museum flick, Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian.

The world’s largest museum complex, the Smithsonian Institution, is in the spotlight and hoping the movie — starring Ben Stiller, Robin Williams and Amy Adams — will draw millions of young new visitors to see the real airplanes and artifacts housed in Washington that are featured in the movie. Kid-friendly product promotions already are offering chances to win free trips for a sleepover at the real Smithsonian.

Much of the movie is set at the National Air and Space Museum, though it also features artworks and treasures from other sites on the National Mall. It’s set for release in theaters May 22.

“Hopefully they can make history come to life,” said aeronautics curator Robert van der Linden, who reviewed the script and made sure film crews didn’t break anything while they shot scenes at the museum last year.

The show is “a complete fantasy,” he said, noting the Wright brothers come alive with their famous flyer zooming out of the museum (the real plane barely got off the ground). Adams portrays the famed pilot Amelia Earhart with her bright red Lockheed Vega airplane. “It reminds people of what’s here,” the curator said.

In the sequel to the 2006 film “Night at the Museum,”which was set at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, Stiller’s character, security guard Larry Daley, comes to Washington to find his museum friends who are stone-cold exhibits by day but spring to life when the sun goes down. They had been shipped from New York to a mythical vault under the National Mall.

The film trailer gives a few more hints about the characters he’ll encounter in D.C. There are roles for Darth Vader, Oscar the Grouch and even Abraham Lincoln, who rises from his seat at the Lincoln Memorial.

It’s even more magical than the first movie, said Claire Brown, a spokeswoman for the Air and Space museum, who has seen the new film.

“Paintings come to life. Photographs come to life. Statues come to life,” she said. “Nothing’s off limits.”

The Smithsonian is capitalizing on this moment — its first time to be so prominently featured in theaters across the country.

Beyond an agreement with 20th Century Fox for the movie’s creation, museum officials and the movie studio have struck deals with McDonald’s, Kraft, Hershey’s and Post cereals to make it hard for anyone to miss this movie and offer the chance to visit the real museums. Sweepstakes offers on millions of boxes of macaroni and cheese, candies and cereals will give away free trips for kids to have a sleepover with their families at the real Smithsonian. Another publicity campaign will help visitors find the real artifacts that they see in the movie.

The strategy is driven, in part, by the last “Museum” movie. It brought in more than $250 million at the U.S. box office and helped drive a 20 percent increase in attendance at the New York museum. And the last big movie that focused on Washington’s cultural scene, “National Treasure,” helped drive up attendance at the National Archives by 200,000 visitors in 2004 — drawing special interest among boys.

The Smithsonian already draws 10 million visitors over the summer months but would like to see even more.

“It’s reaching a demographic that is so important to our future,” Brown said. “We want kids to know they can have fun in museums.”

The Smithsonian also stands to gain more than $1 million if the film does well and tens of thousands of dollars in additional revenue from special events. Spokeswoman Linda St. Thomas said they could not reveal specific figures from the movie deal with Fox.

Washington tourism officials are planning special “Night at the Museum” packages with city hotels and will advertise for the first time in movie theaters in cities such as New York, Philadelphia and Raleigh, N.C.

The nation’s capital already is drawing attention from kids, they said, because there are two young girls living in the White House. (No word yet on whether the Obama daughters have been invited to the movie’s world premiere at the Smithsonian’s IMAX theaters on May 14).

“Often times we hear that parents have a civic duty to bring their families to D.C. for a vacation,” said Victoria Isley of the tourism bureau Destination DC. “But we believe ‘Night at the Museum’ will really help kids inspire visits themselves.”

Other Washington-area museums also are getting in on the action with plans to have their exhibits “come alive” at night, regardless of whether they’re featured in the movie.

During the last two weekends in May, George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate is opening its grounds for lantern-lit evening tours with plans for historical characters to pop out of their exhibits. The site offered similar themed tours tied to the “National Treasure” movie that have been popular even after the show closed in theaters.

“It just proves that marrying pop culture with museums or cultural attractions really works,” said spokeswoman Emily Coleman Dibella. “It gets people excited again about going to museums.”

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Animated animals and pint-sized aliens. Museum relics that come to life at night. Magic rocks that make wishes come true. A bouquet of balloons big enough to lift a house into the sky.

Fantasy and fun take center stage in summer’s crop of family films.

It all begins Memorial Day weekend with “Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian.” Ben Stiller reprises his role as museum security guard Larry Daley, who faces off with exhibits that come to life at night. He’s joined by an all-star cast — Amy Adams, Robin Williams, Owen Wilson, Christopher Guest, Ricky Gervais, Jonah Hill, Hank Azaria and others — as he attempts to rescue a couple of relics shipped to the iconic museum by mistake.

The film boasts a bigger cast, scope and setting than the 2006 Fox original, said director Shawn Levy.

“The first determination was to … enlarge the scope of the movie visually, and shooting at the world’s biggest museum definitely helped do that,” he said. “But more important was deeper story and characters. So many sequels are bloated and bigger and louder, but less interesting. This movie is very much about Ben Stiller’s character and his relationships with not only the love interest in Amy Adams’ Amelia Earhart, but versus the villain in Hank Azaria, so it becomes a much more dynamic movie.”

The fantasy-driven fun continues the following Friday with Pixar’s latest offering, “Up.” The 3D animated film follows an old balloon salesman, voiced by Ed Asner, who takes off on the adventure of a lifetime when he uses his helium-filled wares to lift his house into the sky. Up in the clouds, he discovers he’s accidentally brought along an annoying stowaway — an overly optimistic 8-year-old kid.

Director Pete Docter and co-director Bob Peterson combined two key elements to dream up the story: Their love of the house-on-balloons visual and the fun of a “grouchy old man character,” Docter said.

“It’s just fun to draw, fun to animate,” he said. “He can get away with saying things and being kind of a curmudgeon and a jerk, that most other characters you go, ‘Oh, I don’t like him.’ But he’s earned it. He’s 78 years old. What are you going to say to him, you know? So it was those two elements kind of fusing together that brought this story.”

Robert Rodriguez looked to his life — and his children — for inspiration for his latest family flick, “Shorts.” He and his kids came up with the idea of a magic rock that can make any wish come true while they were making “backyard movies,” Rodriguez said. Suddenly he knew this would be his next family film.
“I thought, ‘This is a good angle for a feature. This should go beyond our little backyard movies to show ourselves,” he said. “It’s just open for a lot of creativity and a lot of ideas and a lot of fun, especially as the rock passes from child to child and family to family and parent to parent … We have almost a ‘Little Rascals’ slew of kids from different families that live in this neighborhood get their lives changed by this magic rock that shows up after a thunderstorm.”

Rodriguez, whose credits include the “Spy Kids” films as well as more adult fare such as “Sin City” and “From Dusk Til Dawn,” said the film is perfect for all ages because “wish fulfillment is something we don’t grow out of.”
That’s the key to a successful family film, he said: All-ages appeal and a feeling of empowerment for the youngest viewers.

“Kids feel like they can do things in the world, yet they still need their mom to drive them to the mall,” he said. “They can’t go make moves on their own yet, so if they get to see other kids being empowered, that’s a fantasy quality for them, and the wish fulfillment in this movie plays a big part of that.”

Levy said a hit family flick mixes excellent casting with humor for everyone.
“It’s two levels of tone. It’s two levels of humor which occasionally dovetail,” he said. “It’s not cast like a family film. It’s cast as the highest-end comedy you could assemble.”

Other family films beckoning at the box office include:

• “Bandslam”: Disney Channel’s Vanessa Hudgens and Alyson Michalka bring their musical skills to this high-school comedy about the ultimate glory: Winning the battle of the bands.

• “G-Force”: A crew of highly trained guinea pigs are espionage experts who aim to save the world in this 3D romp that stars Bill Nighy, Will Arnett and the voices of Sam Rockwell, Tracy Morgan, Penelope Cruz and Nicolas Cage.

• “Imagine That”: Eddie Murphy discovers business secrets in his daughter’s imaginary world. Vanessa Williams and Thomas Haden Church also star.

• “Ponyo”: Cate Blanchett, Matt Damon, Tina Fey, Liam Neeson and Lily Tomlin are among those who lend their voices to Hayao Miyazaki’s animated tale of an eager goldfish who wants to become human.

• “They Came From Upstairs”: When pint-sized alien invaders with aspirations to destroy the planet take up residence in a family’s vacation home, it’s up to the kids to save the day. Kevin Nealon and Ashley Tisdale star.