In movies like “Happy Feet” and “March of the Penguins,” we learned that penguins feed their young by eating fish, then sticking their beaks down the gullets of their young and regurgitating the yucky mess down their throats. Imagine that executive producer Christopher Columbus and director Shawn Levy are penguins, the audience are their chicks, and “Night at the Museum” is a gooey wad of regurgitated story points, half-baked ideas, and slick special effects sprayed down our throats and you’ll get some idea of what watching this film is like.

That may be a repellent analogy, but I came out of this slick, soulless Ben Stiller vehicle desperate for something real, something gross or something nice, it didn’t matter which: I just wanted to feel something. “Night at the Museum” is one of those movies written by screenwriting software, in which the story and characters go through their paces so mechanically that the digital effects feel like the only living things onscreen. And with Mickey Rooney and Dick Van Dyke in the cast, that may be literally true.

Mr. Stiller plays Larry Daley, the kind of broke dad with big dreams that veteran moviegoers recognize as an instant signal that they can go to sleep; the entire movie will be a convoluted exercise in redeeming him in the eyes of his son. Daley is divorced, jobless, and Paul Rudd, a far better actor, is raising his kid. In a panic, Daley takes a job at the Museum of Natural History as the night watchman.

To make a tedious story short, when night falls the museum exhibits come to life. Chaos ensues, and the idea is enough of a hook that small children or people who have never seen a movie before might be amused. Dioramas of teeny little Roman soldiers, let by Octavius (the British comedian Steve Coogan), do battle with the neighboring Wild West diorama led by Jedediah (Owen Wilson). An Easter Island head demands gum, the mummy starts pounding on his coffin for a refund, and Attila the Hun stalks the halls looking for the craft services table.

The most terrifying special effects in the film, however, are the bad guys: Mickey Rooney, Dick Van Dyke, and Bill Cobbs. Mr. Rooney acts like a man who had his hearing aid switched off and doesn’t quite know where he is. Mr. Van Dyke has played so many avuncular uncle roles that when the time comes to be evil he seems truly terrifying, as if Santa Claus came down your chimney, got drunk, and started swinging your cat around by its tail. Mr. Cobbs has five lines.

Mr. Stiller is hidden beneath a thick layer of pancake makeup, delivering his lines and hitting his marks with all the passion of a man who’s waiting for his check to clear. The closest he comes to being funny is when he steals Mr. Wilson’s material about helping bad guys find their inner child. He also gets slapped by a monkey, which is always comedy gold.

The rest of the cast is an all-star lineup of comedians: Ricky Gervais! Steve Coogan! Robin Williams! But they’re given so little to do that they could have been anybody. Mr. Williams is notable as Teddy Roosevelt only because this is the worst Teddy Roosevelt ever put on film. Give me Tom Berenger in “Rough Riders” or Brian Keith in “The Wind and the Lion” over Mr. Williams’s mincing, Prussian officer.

The idea of a museum coming to life at night is fertile soil, and there are ideas in “Night at the Museum” that could fire up a young kid’s mind. But the best characters are the ones, like the Easter Island head, that are used the least. We’re promised dreams made real, a fantastic concept brought to life, but in the hands of a director like Mr. Levy (“Cheaper by the Dozen,” “The Pink Panther”) and a producer like Mr. Columbus (“Bicentennial Man,” “Rent”), what we actually receive are a bunch of characters frugging around to a “Superhits of the 70’s” disco number. If this is a childhood dream, then I prefer the nightmares.