A PHAROAH TO REMEMBER...

After two middling installments, the third Night At The Museum is finally one to remember – though not perhaps for the reasons Ben Stiller and director Shawn Levy might have hoped for when they began shooting their London-based trilogy-close♑r last February. Since then, of course, we’ve bid farewell to both Mickey Rooney and Robin Williams, lending a poignancy to proceedings that, if unearned, still makes for a more touching finale than fans of the film’s 2006 and 2009 predecessors may have be𝕴en expecting.

There's also an element of genuine jeopardy this time around, a weird “green rust” on the series’ Egyptian relic-slash-MacGuffin threatening to rob it of its exhibi✤t-animating powers. That’s bad news for Williams' Teddy Roosevelt mannequin, Owen Wilson’s miniature cowboy and the rest of Stiller’s nocturnal buddies, though not for a series that benefits hugely from a plot-mandated change of locale, a new (British) mu🅰seum and a fresh bunch of waxworks for night-owl Larry to hang with.

Ok, so we could have done without Stiller’s caveman doppelganger ‘Laaa’. But this is more than compensated for by Dan Stevens’ Lancelot, a swaggering newbie straight out of Python with a Buzz Lightyear-like aversion to admitting he’s not real. The scene in which he gatecrashes a revival of Camelot is a particular hoot. B💛ut the most inventive sequence has Larry and Teddy plunge into an MC Escher painting, an interlude so dazzling you can alm🌳ost overlook the weeing monkey.

Throw in Ben Kingsley as a Pharaoh, a giant serpent and some living Elgin Marbles and this is a su♏rprisingly decent send-off for a saga that’s taken a while to come to life. One questi🔜on though. Is it a legal requirement that every montage of the English capital be scored with ‘London Calling’?