Making a critical judgment of a movie like The Mummy Returns is sort of like
honking your car horn whilst stuck in rush hour traffic: totally pointless, yet you feel compelled to do so anyway. It
doesn't matter if this, the "filmed deal" (thank you Roger Ebert) to the
1999 blockbuster, got either the best or worst reviews of the year. People
know what to expect from the film and with an overdose of marketing shoved
down their throats, they will show up in droves (judging from its record
opening, they did).
However, the question still remains: is it a good movie? The answer to that
is well, not really. If you look at it in terms of plot, character
development, emotional involvement or a necessary second instalment, you
just lost nine bucks. If you are looking for some cool set pieces and CGI
effects up the wazoo, accompanied by ear-splitting digital sound and,
hopefully, air conditioning, then you have only lost five bucks.
It is eight years later and adventurers Rick O'Connell (Brendan Fraser) and
Evelyn Carnahan (Rachel Weisz) now are married and have a son named Alex
(Freddie Boath) who is every bit as resourceful and adventurous as his
parents.
Good thing too, because the trio are once again battling the evil
Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo) and his armies of the undead. The quest this time
centers around a bracelet the O'Connell's unearthed that will bring back a
mysterious warrior named the Scorpion King (WWF star The Rock) and pretty
much spell certain doom if it falls into the wrong hands. When Alex decides
to put it on his wrist in order to hide it when Imhotep's baddies show up at
the O'Connell's house in England, they swipe the kid and head off back to
Egypt, with our heroes, including Evelyn's brother Jonathan (John Hannah)
and the mysterious warrior Ardeth Bay (Oded Fehr), close behind in pursuit.
When I sat down to watch this film, I knew what not to expect: a decent
plot, characters with more than one dimension or that sacred cow of
modern-day cinema, originality. I mean, let's face facts here people: this
isn't Memento. I just wanted to have fun and be viscerally thrilled in the
same way the first two Indiana Jones adventures or the original Romancing
The Stone did.
While I did enjoy a few of the set pieces (a fun chase
through London and a Jurassic Park rip-off involving skeletal pygmies
instead of raptors), the rest of the film left me cold. There was so much
going on in terms of chases and battles and stunts galore (enough for two
films), but very little of it was thrilling. Writer/director Stephen Sommers
wants desperately to walk in the cinematic shoes of Steven Spielberg and
George Lucas (the film borrows heavily from both of them), but he just
doesn't have the right grasp on what makes an adventure film work: pacing,
fun dialogue or giving the cast a chance to play around with their
characters. He knows how to fill a movie with visual popcorn, he just hasn't
figured out how to fully cook it.
I won't go into too much detail about the cast or the acting. What there is
of it is adequate, although they seem to be having less fun this time out
than they did in the first one (Brendan Fraser looks bored). One exception
to this would have to be the young Freddie Boath, who nicely sidesteps the
usual cute kid cliché and seems to be the one person having a good time on
screen. As for the much publicized screen debut of the Rock, for the five
minutes he is on screen, he does a dilly of a job throwing people around,
yelling and biting a scorpion in half (and if that thrilled you kids, just
wait! A spin-off movie of the Scorpion King is in the works for next year).
The real star of the film however, is Industrial Light and Magic, who was
paid a reported $20 million for their work here. Was it worth it? Well, yes
and no. For the amount of money they were paid, the effects should have
rivaled their work on The Perfect Storm or Star Wars: Episode 1. It doesn't.
Some of the effects are quite good, but a lot of them look cheesy and just
plain bad (the Scorpion King at the end is a joke). I'm not sure if it was a
rushed production or whether ILM is too busy with Star Wars: Episode II, but
a lot of this work is substandard in this day and age.
The Mummy Returns is a loud, frenetic and unoriginal Hollywood byproduct
that leaves the viewer worn out and under whelmed. In short, it is your
typical popcorn movie that will ride the tsunami of hype to a half-billion
dollar box office worldwide.
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