Let’s talk about the parenting skills of Larry (Ben Stiller) in the film Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb.
His son Nick (Skyler Gisondo) is completing his final exams and about to apply to universities. So when Larry returns home at 3am from a work event, he finds his son holding a house party with over 30 of his mates. It’s a family film, so the debauchery extends to a few polite greetings when Larry enters and the consumption of non-alcoholic punch. But it is still 3am in the morning. You would think Larry should have at least sent his son to stay with his mother for the night, or kept tabs on his son earlier than 3am.
It doesn’t get much better once Larry shuts down the party. Instead of accepting a stern talking to from his father, Nick approaches the situation of cleaning up the apartment by asking his father to fund his gap year and saying, “Let’s call it a night. Let’s not even clean up, right. Let’s come back tomorrow. Let’s reboot the whole energy; the whole tone of this puppy. And we’ll kill it man.”
Far be it for me to tell Larry how to raise his child, but you would think this might be a good time to cut Nick’s allowance off and ground him for a couple of months until his exams are complete. Instead Larry suggests that Nick clean up the mess and they’ll finish the conversation tomorrow.
He doesn’t finish the conversation tomorrow. He takes his son with him on a work trip to London to assist in returning the tablet of Ahkmenrah to its rightful place at the British Museum. Obviously Larry and company didn’t do much research about how the British Museum historically garnered its worldly collection of artefacts, otherwise he’d have questioned why the rightful place for an Ancient Egyptian magical rock was in a class cabinet in the middle of London.
Then, as if the makers of this film haven’t demonstrated enough average parenting skills, the film begins to depict a substantial amount of untruths about the British Museum. These incorrect facts are not just a couple of under-researched history notes, but substantial redesigns to the layout of the museum and the addition of a number of items that do not appear in the museum. The most notable being the inclusion of dinosaur bones, which are housed at the Natural History Museum, not the British Museum.
The British Museum has dedicated an entire page of its website to clearing up some of the confusion. The most damning point made relates to Sir Lancelot being an entirely fictional character. Yet in this film, Lancelot is portrayed as an armoured Downton Abbey dropout – a most racial generalisation. It’s no wonder he aims to sabotage the entire operation.
The redemption, for what is actually quite a comedic jaunt, is the concluding scenes with Larry and Nick, where the son explains that he’s going to Ibiza to pursue his career as a DJ. They both state their love for each other, hug and walk off into the snow. It’s heart-warming to know that when you’re losing direction in life, you can always convince your parents you’ll find meaning by DJ-ing a seedy nightclub until 6am on a Spanish island.
kids i hated 