Well, that was predictable. When the first images from Shawn Levy and Ben Stiller’s third helping of museum madness, Night At The Museum: Secret Of The Tomb arrived online on Monday, we saw them as the sure sign a trailer would arrive. And what do you know? We were right.
Stiller returns as Larry Daley, one of the few people that know the secret held within New York’s American Museum Of Natural History – a stone tablet from the time of the Pharaohs that brings all the exhibits to life and has caused him no end of trouble. But in his capacity as watchman of the building, he’s grown to be friends with many of the historical figures and other displays that magically start to move and speak at night, so when they discover the tablet is corroding, the quest is on to stop them all reverting to wax figures, stone statues and rigged collections of bones.
Larry and some of the gang including Pharaoh Ahkmenrah (Rami Malek), Teddy Roosevelt (Robin Williams), Attila the Hun (Patrick Gallagher), Sacagawea (Mizuo Peck), Roman centurion Octavius (Steve Coogan) and Jedediah (Owen Wilson) must travel to London’s British Museum to find out how to fix it. There, they’ll encounter the object’s creator, Ahkmenrah’s father (Ben Kingsley), Dan Stevens as Sir Lancelot and Rebel Wilson as a security guard at the museum who is surprised when her charges start coming to life – and spilling out on to the streets of the capital.
It looks like much of the same from the franchise, so take that as either a promise or a threat. Your enjoyment may be decided upon how much you enjoy watching a capuchin monkey saving Octavius and Jedediah from a mock-up of Pompeii by dousing them in urine. Night At The Museum: Secret Of The Tomb is out on December 19, monkey wee and all.