Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb arrived in December 2014 as the third and final live-action entry in a series that had already sent its security guard to the Smithsonian. Shawn Levy returned to direct. Ben Stiller returned as Larry Daley. The tablet that makes the exhibits come alive is dying, and the film’s whole engine is a race to London to fix it before the magic runs out.
It is a thin engine, and the film knows it.
Trailer, via 20th Century Studios India.
The Tablet of Ahkmenrah Is Corroding
The plot opens in 1938, in Egypt, where a team of archaeologists hunts the tomb of pharaoh Ahkmenrah. A young Cecil “C.J.” Fredericks finds the Tablet of Ahkmenrah. The locals warn the team not to take it. “The end will come,” they say. The film treats that line as a prophecy, and 76 years later it pays off.
In New York, five years after the events of Battle of the Smithsonian, Larry Daley is still the night guard at the Museum of Natural History. He and the exhibits are hosting an event to help re-open the Hayden Planetarium. The museum has commissioned a new Neanderthal model that looks like Larry. It calls itself Laaa and treats Larry as its father. Stiller plays both.
Then Ahkmenrah shows Larry the tablet. A mysterious corrosion is spreading across it. As it spreads, the exhibits act abnormally and wreck the planetarium event. Dr. Leslie McPhee, the museum director, gets fired due to the planetarium incident.
Larry Daley Goes to London
Larry’s answer is to find Ahkmenrah’s parents. Cecil, now in a retirement community after his release from prison, remembers the prophecy and says it means the tablet’s magic is ending and the exhibits will go lifeless. He tells Larry that Merenkahre and Shepseheret may be able to restore the tablet, and that they are in the British Museum.
So Larry talks McPhee into shipping Ahkmenrah to London. McPhee agrees despite believing the magic is just clever special effects. Larry, Ahkmenrah and Nick make the trip.
The London stretch is where the film puts its best ideas. The British Museum at night is a bigger toy box than the American one, and the film fills it with Rebel Wilson as Tilly, the night security guard, and Dan Stevens as Sir Lancelot, the wax statue of the Knight of the Round Table. Lancelot is the only new character with any charge to him. Stevens plays him as a man who has read too much about himself and believes all of it.
The returning cast does what it has always done. Owen Wilson’s Jedediah and Steve Coogan’s Octavius bicker. Robin Williams returns as Theodore Roosevelt, Larry’s mentor, and also voices Garuda. The film gives him a farewell without announcing that it is one.
A Cast Doing Familiar Work
The full roster:
- Ben Stiller as Larry Daley and Laaa
- Robin Williams as Theodore Roosevelt, and the voice of Garuda
- Owen Wilson as Jedediah Smith
- Steve Coogan as Octavius
- Ricky Gervais as Dr. Leslie McPhee
- Dan Stevens as Sir Lancelot
- Rebel Wilson as Tilly
- Skyler Gisondo as Nick Daley
- Rami Malek as Ahkmenrah
- Ben Kingsley as Merenkahre
- Anjali Jay as Shepseheret
- Mizuo Peck as Sacajawea
- Patrick Gallagher as Attila the Hun
Ben Kingsley arrives late as Merenkahre, the mummy of an ancient pharaoh and Ahkmenrah’s father, with Anjali Jay as Shepseheret, Ahkmenrah’s mother. Kingsley is a serious actor in a film that has stopped being serious about anything except its own sentiment. He plays the part straight, which is the right call and also the lonely one.
Skyler Gisondo takes over as Nick Daley, now a teenager. The film gives Larry a subplot about his son’s post-high school future, and it is the weakest thread in the movie. It exists to give Larry something to learn. It gives him nothing.
What the Movie Is Actually About
Strip the museum and the tablet away and Secret of the Tomb is a film about a man who cannot let go of a job. Larry has spent three movies as the night guard. The exhibits are his friends, his charges and, in a real sense, his family. The tablet dying is the film’s way of saying that the good years are over.
That is a real idea. The film does not trust it.
Instead it runs the clock. The corrosion spreads. The exhibits malfunction. Larry flies to London. The film keeps moving because moving is easier than sitting with the thing it is actually about. Levy is a competent director of momentum. He is not a director who slows down.
The result is a movie that is never boring and never surprising. Every beat arrives when you expect it. The jokes land at the volume you expect. The emotional beats are cued by music you have heard before.
“One final night to save the day.”
That is the tagline, and it is honest about what the film is: a countdown. The problem with a countdown is that the audience knows the number. Secret of the Tomb never finds a way to make the number matter.
The Series Runs Out of Magic
The box office tells its own story. Secret of the Tomb grossed over $363 million, making it the lowest-grossing film in the series. Like its predecessors, it received mixed reviews. The published critical score sits at 4.7 out of 10, with a Metacritic mark of 47 out of 100.
Those numbers are not a scandal. They are a diagnosis. The first Night at the Museum had a hook: a man who does not believe in magic gets locked in a building full of it. The second had a bigger building. The third has a dying battery. Each film has added scale and subtracted wonder, and by the third the scale is all that is left.
The London museum is a good setting. Tilly is a good joke. Lancelot is a good character. None of them are enough to carry a film whose central mechanic is decay. A story about magic running out has to make you feel the loss. Secret of the Tomb mostly makes you feel the runtime.
Good Pieces, No Assembly
Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb is a 98-minute farewell that says goodbye to a series without ever finding a reason to exist beyond that goodbye. It is not a bad film. It is a tired one. The cast is game, the production is polished, and the whole thing has the flat, dutiful feel of a contract being honored.
The detail that matters most is not the box office or the reviews. It is that the film’s best new idea, Sir Lancelot, is also its most disposable. Dan Stevens gives the movie a jolt of genuine comedy, and the movie uses him as a plot device and then moves on. That is the pattern everywhere here. Good pieces, no assembly.
What the film gets right is the ending. It gives Robin Williams a quiet exit, and it lets the museum close. That decency counts for something, even if the film around it never earns the feeling. It is his final appearance in the series, and his presence in it now carries weight the filmmakers could not have planned. That is not a reason to watch Secret of the Tomb. It is a reason to be gentle with it.
The tablet’s magic ends. So does the series. Neither goes out with the bang the tagline promised.
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