A clearly well-intentioned movie is rather more of a rarity in Hollywood these days than we should like, and as a consequence I am favorably toward such pictures even when the results don’t quite measure up. Night at the Museum is one such, a big-budget comedy loaded with special effects for Christmas vacation audiences, aimed at pre-adolescents whose sense of wonder is stronger than their sense of logic. It’s got nice visual effects, nice performances, nice ideas, and nice intentions.

Yet it sells its young audience short, as the filmmakers seem never to have recognized that just as the protagonist’s young son can figure out the meaning of things without the answers being written in hundred-foot-tall letters, so can ordinary children who attend movies. Nor do the filmmakers seem to understand that children who are not ready to figure out a message won’t get it just because you shout it. As are most contemporary films aimed at kids, Night at the Museum is mostly rather silly and implausible even as we grant its premise that a magical Egyptian tablet allows the exhibits in a museum to come to life every night.

The messages, as I say, are laid on with laborious explicitness. One is that everyone in the world would be happy if we all just tried to understand each other and love one another. Not exactly going out on a limb with that one, they aren’t. The movie makes this point thoroughy explicit in an extremely cringemaking scene in which the protagonist gives Atilla the Hun an impromptu session in psychotherapy (psycobabble, actually), which ends with the historical marauder in tears. I kid you not. To be fair to the filmmakers, the scene is meant to be funny, but to be fair to the audience, it is only right to note that it isn’t.

This insanely pie-in-the-sky idea is balanced by a couple rather more attainable messages for the wee ones. The more predictable one is that history is a good thing and that it’s important to know the past so that—well, you know why. The film portrays knowledge, imagination, and the pursuit of wisdom as immensely positive things, and it is good indeed to see a film that does so.

The other message, which is given mostly by implication rather than explicit smarmy Hollywood jibber-jabber, is that it’s important for each person to take responsibility for their actions, with the corollary point that being willing to accept the task of looking after the welfare of one’s neighbors and make hard choices is what makes for a good person and a real hero. OK, bravo for that, and I hope the kids take note.

All very nice and Christian messages they are, but it would be nice if they weren’t written in such gigantic letters. Still, at least the filmmakers mean well, and that counts for something.

What is not forgiveable is that the film entirely wastes the talents of Dick Van Dyke and Mickey Rooney, using them as decidedly uninteresting foils in the protagonist’s getting of wisdom. While it is good to see Ben Stiller play the protagonist correctly as the straight-man character he is, resisting the tendency to overact and telegraph comic effects, it would have been wonderful to see these two brilliant comic actors stretch their legs a bit. Indeed, one might greatly hope that a film that celebrates the imagination would be a bit more imaginative in this regard—and in most other ways. But I guess we can’t have everything, can we?

Hey, maybe that’s the real message of Night at the Museum !

Nah, probably not.