The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (*)

Directed By: Rob Cohen
Starring: Brendan Fraser, Maria Bello, Jet Li
Seen: August 15th 2008

* Out of ****

The Mummy was awesome in 1999. The Mummy Returns just about as cool in 2001 (apart from the pathetic special effects near the end of the film, when the Scorpion King is actually revealed). The Scorpion King, a spin-off, was scorned and not truly acknowledged as one of the series in 2002. Now, after 7 years, the official third instalment seems like the one that should have been scorned. At least the Scorpion King was unpretentious fun – it knew it was a wrestling movie in the form of a mummy film and didn’t try to hide it. The Mummy 3, however, was abysmal.

Void of a single original thought, the film is further weighed down by the replacement of Rachel Weisz’s Evelyn with Maria Bello; a poor choice, since Bello’s British accent is about as convincing as Bush’s “honest” election win in 2004… The scenes between Bello and Fraser are painful to watch, and you wish for the action to start, but once it does Fraser becomes a frantic joke in a kid’s movie and Bello’s uptight British lady becomes a Lara Croft wannabe, still with a crap British accent.

The film runs 13 years after the events of the second one, and here we are introduced to Alex O’Connel, Rick’s son who is now not a little boy anymore, but a young man in his mid twenties. In real life Fraser is only 13 years older than Luke Ford (Alex), and this now makes a still youthful Fraser (not nearly 13 years older looking) the old guy that has to take a backseat in the action but doesn’t. In Indiana Jones and the kingdom of the Crystal Skull it worked to give Indy a son, because he’s getting older, but Rick definitely is not there yet.

The first Mummy starred Arnold Vosloo as the menacing Mummy, with a few henchmen Mummies. The Mummy Returns starred Vosloo yet again as Imhotep, this time joined in his villainy by The Scorpion King and an army of mummies again tied into the Egyptian lore (think Anubis, The Age of Mythology and the desert of Ahm Shere). Admittedly, this film’s ending starred the worst special effects ever, with the pathetic CGI Scorpion King climbing out of a closet close to its end. Yet still it’s by far better than the third one, which has good special effects all round. Here we go one step further, now it’s TWO armies of mummies fighting each other, and we have good mummy people (who effortlessly speak English) and bad mummy people, all of whom have nothing to do with Egypt anymore, since we’re off to China.

Jet Li is famous for his martial arts, and so is Michelle Yeoh, but their fight lasts all of 5 seconds, something that The Forbidden Kingdom got right quite entertainingly, squaring off Li and Jackie Chan. This face-off however, is disappointing, to say the least. There’s a lot of frantic scrambling and bad mummy humour, repetitive action scenes, and all round unoriginal ideas. Jet Li even “bleeds” chocolate when he turns into a terracotta mummy… And thousands of years later is released to continue his vengeful plot to take over the world with his terracotta army…

Some people called this film brain-dead fun. Brain-dead? Definitely. Fun? Hell no.

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