At no time does Hollywood have less respect for story than the summer, when the total world wide gross of a movie stands in direct proportion to the number of special effects shots and direct inverse proportion to the amount of actual plot. (I just made that up, but I’m sure it’s what your average producer making a movie for the school recess market believes.) Thinking is for cold weather: bring on the explosions, CGI critters, and pop culture references!

It helps a lot to go in expecting that. Take the marquee- (not to mention definite-article-) unfriendly Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, which those of you with kids too young for the new Terminator movie will probably be seeing this weekend.

As I never saw the original Night at the Museum, I am in no position to offer you a comparative analysis. What I can tell you is that while by any critical standard it’s noisy, disposable junk, it is more often than not fun disposable junk.

Since the last movie, our hero Larry (Ben Stiller) has become a success inventing and marketing the kind of crap that gets sold on TV infomercials at 3 am. (time that used to be put to much better use airing old sitcoms, movies you’ve never heard of and test patterns). Apparently he’s doing pretty well, because he has not only offices but a warehouse in Manhattan. No new business can afford a warehouse in Manhattan -that’s what Jersey and Queens are for.

On a visit to his friends at the Museum of Natural History, the ones who came to unexpected life during the last movie, he is consterned* to find they are being put into storage to make way for new special-effects intensive displays. (The irony of a big summer special effects movie about how evil special effects are is not pursued.)

They are stored in the enormous archives under the Smithsonian, and I won’t waste any more of your time detailing how Larry comes to track them there. Suffice to say that the magical Egyptian table that brought everything to life in the last movie has more subjects to work on here, including a villain who wants to use it for world domination. (I’m not sure why movie villains always want to dominate the world, which seems like it would be an awful lot of work and no fun at all, but there you go.)

Said villain is played by Hank Azaria, who uses a voice stolen from Boris Karloff, all soft-spoken aristocratic lisp. I don’t know if this is a reference to the fact that Karloff played the movies’ original undead Egyptian more than 75 years ago in The Mummy. But it’s a wonderful voice and delightful to listen to.

Azaria gets to have fun doing goofy stuff that has nothing to do with driving any story along. And that’s what I liked about the movie. It doesn’t always work – there’s a tiresome bit with Jonah Hill as a security guard that seems to go on forever. But there are fun bits by Steve Coogan as bit-sized Roman centurian Octavius, who’s crowning moment of glory comes with a fearsome squirrel; Bill Heder as one George (Armstrong Custer) that keeps threatening to turn into another one (W. Bush); Eugene Levy as the voice of a gaggle of bobblehead Albert Einsteins; a cameo by Oscar the Grouch; and a funny bit by, of all people, the Jonas Brothers, as – but why should I spoil it for you?

Look fast for scriptwriters Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant, of Comedy Central’s “Reno 911,” as the Wright Brothers.

There is also Amy Adams who, as Amelia Earhart, spends the movie in a pair of skin-tight aviator pants that threaten to nudge the movie into a PG-13. It never happens, but it’s something for the fathers in the audience.

There is both more and less of a story in Dance Flick, the latest in an endless line of parody movies that depend on you recognizing references to plot elements from other movies. In this case the target is urban dance movies, and even though that is a genre I have studiously avoided over the past decade, I recognized all the clichés anyway.

So why did I even go to see this? Because it was from the Wayans Brothers, who sometimes manage to make this kind of thing funny. (I admit to liking both White Chicks and Little Man).

The trouble is that, with a second generation of Wayanses now in on what has become the family business, there are so many of them in on it that you just never know what you’re going to get when you see the label “Wayans Brothers”. The director of record here is Damien Wayans, a nephew of the brothers, and the result is a lot more miss than hit. With a PG-13 rating it isn’t as gross as their Scary Movie entries, but a depressing number of jokes are based on familiarity with tabloid celebrity scandals. I could report as a point of reference how the audience reacted, but at the Friday afternoon show I went to there were only two other viewers.

* I know there’s no such word as “consterned.” But if there is a noun “consternation,” then why isn’t there a verb “constern”?

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