Allow me to begin with a question.  Imagine you’ve been commissioned to write a comedy involving French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.  What’s the first thing that comes to mind?  Short jokes, right?  This is the problem.

You’d think famed luminaries of world history like General Custer, Teddy Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart, Ivan the Terrible, and Napoleon would have more interesting things to say.  Instead, they’re reduced to absurd caricatures for a film wrought with pedestrian, unfailingly predictable, and occasionally chuckle-eliciting fare that only serves to perpetuate the stereotype of the common American’s suspect knowledge of history.

In “Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian,” the sequel to 2006′s inexplicably popular “Night at the Museum,” Larry Daley (Ben Stiller) has finally found success.  He’s graduated from a struggling single father working a dead-end, minimum wage job, to fame and fortune as a Ron Popeil-style infomercial inventor/salesman.

In true Hollywood style though, success, of course, means that Larry is now too busy for a sit-down dinner with his kid, or to hang out with his magical, museum-exhibit buddies that inspired him to become an inventor in the first place.

When Larry finally does find time to join the nocturnal antics at New York’s Museum of Natural History he discovers that the exhibits will soon be moved to Washington D.C.’s sprawling Smithsonian complex and replaced by more kid-friendly, interactive “Star Wars”-style holograms.  So he does the only logical thing and impersonates a security officer, breaks into a federal institution, and risks destroying priceless artifacts in order to save the lives of entities that can’t die anyway because they’re made out of plastic and other synthetic materials.  This type of dangerous, inane, illegal insanity isn’t the half of it.

What’s that?  I should lighten up because it’s only a children’s movie, you say?  I must disagree.  You see, the simple fact that a film is targeted towards a younger demographic shouldn’t be a license for lazy writing and anti-creativity.  Take a Dr. Suess book, for example.  His work is clearly targeted at children but the writing is wonderfully creative.  The art work too.  This film has little time for such things, opting for only the most obvious, pop-culture tinged jokes and predictable situations.

Although “Battle of the Smithsonian” is a virtually plotless, banal, lazy mess, it clearly has a goal–to distract.  The film is nothing more than a vehicle for product placement and action figure development.

The performances have their issues as well.  Ben Stiller is as lifeless as one of McG’s Terminators and might as well be sleep-walking.  Hank Azaria plays the villainous, ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Kah Mun Rah with a haughty, British-accented lisp that bears a striking resemblance to Boris Karloff’s Imhotep in 1932′s “The Mummy.”  It’s passable but takes some getting used to.  Owen Wilson is likeable enough, as usual, but offers little else to the narrative.  But the twice Oscar-nominated Amy Adams is a delight.  Despite her monumentally inaccurate portrayal of seminal aviatrix, Amelia Earhart, Adams brings a natural sense of fun–as opposed to the forced kind that riddles the rest of film.

Perhaps this movie’s most deplorable contribution to popular culture is its about-face on what it means to follow your dreams.  Its predecessor taught us that the world has more to offer than endlessly toiling in a stifling, minimum wage job.  This film teaches us that the monetization of innovation and invention is greedy and that such socially and practically beneficial creativity should be kept to ourselves.

(2 and a half out of 5 stars)