The Premise: At night, after the museum of natural history closes, the exhibits come to life, causing trouble for the night watchman. Mayhem ensues.

The Pitch: It’s like Jumanji crossed by Home Alone—but in a museum!

The Plot: Well, to tell you the truth, it’s pretty inconsequential and really wasn’t worth the time the movie spent setting it up. (And what plot does exist is pretty clichéd: A father must rise to the occasion to prove to his son that he’s worthwhile, while learning something about the virtue of perseverance. Or something. Frankly, the movie could have left the main character’s personal life on the cutting room floor and the movie wouldn’t have suffered.

The Point: A largely mindless, but fairly entertaining Holiday special effects extravaganza best enjoyed in the company of young children.

I took my daughters (ages 6 and 9) to see a special advanced screening of A Night at the Museum tonight in the IMAX dome theater at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History. I’ll include a little bit about the promotion later.

Let’s face it, it’s really all about the premise here and if you’re under the age of ten, it works perfectly. What if you worked in a museum (especially the Museum of Natural History), and what if at night, all the exhibits came to life? That’d be cool, huh? And you know, if that’s all you’re expecting, it kind of is. Among the more entertaining museum inhabitants are a mischievous monkey, a playful (but dangerous) T-Rex skeleton, rival dioramas, one from the Old West, lead by a cowboy named Jedediah (Owen Wilson), and another of the Roman Empire headed by and Octavius Caesar (Steve Coogan), and Attila the Hun, with his Hun entourage. The variety of museum exhibits allow for numerous rollicking set pieces and amusing situations.

Unfortunately, the premise itself needs a storyline to hang itself on, and here, the movie doesn’t do as well. Ben Stiller plays Larry Daley, a divorced father who floats from scheme to job without managing to accomplish much. His ex, Kim Raver (24, The Nine) is engaged to a successful Wall Street bond trader (Paul Rudd), and his son is starting to figure out that his father is a loser. In the twenty minutes or so that the movie uses to establish this storyline, it comes perilously close to failing to capture the short attention span of its target audience. In a desperate attempt to become gainfully employed, Larry takes a job as a night watchman at the generically named Museum of Natural History. None of this matters much. In fact, I bored myself writing the last few sentences about it. Raver and Rudd are completely wasted. (Ricky Gervais, who plays an uptight museum director is almost utterly wasted, but does have a couple funny scenes that are altogether too brief.)

There’s also an obligatory-love-interest docent who has spent the last four years writing her thesis on Sacagawea (whose exhibit, for reasons that are never adequately explained, is kept behind plate glass, despite the fact that it consists of little more than three mannequins and a canoe). The Teddy Roosevelt mannequin (Robin Williams) is also obsessed with Sacagawea, though the bold and brash ex-pres doesn’t have the gumption to confess his love to the glass-display bound Indian maiden. Both of these subplots, in case you are wondering, are just as disposable as the main plot.

Finally, there are the three soon-to-be retired night watchmen who Larry is meant to replace, played to good effect by Dick Dan Dyke, Mickey Rooney and Bill Cobbs. Their subplot actually does matter, but I won’t spoil it by telling you too much, except to say that it revolves around a mysterious Egyptian tablet belonging to a mummy housed in the museum, and it’s the mummy has magic that makes the whole thing tick.

Most of the main actors are adequate, within the limits of the script and plot. I’m hit-or-miss on Ben Stiller movies myself, but I thought this one was more hit than miss and the Stiller does a fine job of playing the poor likable schmuck. Only Robin Williams falls flat. I never found his Teddy Roosevelt convincing or even movie matinée effective. The character is meant to be key, and Williams doesn’t manage to give it the weight it needs to work.

The special effects are what we’ve come to expect from a big-budget movie, which means they are quite good. The computer CGI wasn’t noticeable, and the movie made nice use out of the grand scale of the marbled museum setting. Although I usually enjoy IMAX presentations, I found this one to be a bit difficult to watch. There was so much going on that I found myself moving my head like I was watching a match at Wimbledon. I might have actually preferred a nice large theater screen. The film quality looked great, though, and this is the type of movie that is worth seeing on the big screen, or not at all. (I suppose a nice big screen HDTV would do the job in a pinch.) Despite the slow start and the slight plot, once the movie gets going, it does pick up a sort of kinetic energy that is fun to watch while munching popcorn. Nothing spectacular, mind you, but not an unpleasant way to spend an evening if you want to take young kids out during the holidays. I enjoyed it more than I did watching the IMAX presentation of The Polar Express two years ago. I suspect that without much kid-movie competition this movie will do just fine in the box office. My 9-year-old loved it, and my 6-year-old liked it a lot, but thought some parts were too intense. The movie is a solid PG, with just a few oblique innuendos thrown in for the adults, as seems to be the rule.

Finally, I have to give props to 20th Century Fox and the Fort Worth Science and History Museum for putting together a nice promotion. The screening was followed by a scavenger hunt, conducted in the museum by flashlights, which were themselves movie merch, the successful completion of which was rewarded by movie posters. My kids enjoyed the scavenger hunt as much as the movie.

In sum, go for the thrills, don’t expect much by way of plot, bring along a youngster, and you might just enjoy Night at the Museum. If that’s not enough encouragement, then don’t bother.