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Explorer Rick O’Connell (Brendan Fraser) |
The Mummy - Gang are raiders of the lost plot!
THE MUMMY:
TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR
Directed by Rob Cohen
Certificate 12a
THIS film is as musty as the 2,000-year-old mummy that provides a baddie for our returning heroes to do battle with.
With a superbly stupid plot and a series of obvious hoops for the actors to jump through, this third installment in the Mummy series does what you would expect. Therefore you should not be disappointed by the fact it’s pretty awful.
We discover our original heroes, Rick Connell and his wife Evelyn, are semi-retired, but their son Alex has taken on the mantle of globe-trotting, tomb-raiding adventurer.
The plot focuses on the Dragon Emperor, a mummy who’s been locked in a suspended sleep alongside his 10,000-strong terracotta army.
Alex is tricked into saying rise and shine to the fusty old fellow. It was not a wise move and now he asks Mum and Dad to come and clear up the mess.
The Emperor is of course bent on some kind of world domination and our foot-stumbling, danger-bumbling and line-mumbling adventurers are all that stands in its way.
The ultimate problem with this film is it has all been done before. From Indiana Jones to Romancing The Stone, from Tomb Raider back to the two original Mummy films, we’ve all clambered into cob-webbed catacombs and watched our heroes do battle with eerie reincarnations from lost civilisations. Ultimately, the Mummy bunch are treading a well-travelled path and it means they need to do that much more to make it interesting. They have failed.
It was never a classy exponent of the action-adventure genre, and it’s not much fun to think studios believe the cinema-going public are still gullible enough to keep actors like Brendan Fraser reprising his archaeologist role.
At least the writers don’t tax him with anything he hasn’t done before. The smooth-chinned, jut-jawed adventurer sets out to do what he does best: unravel curses and combat monsters.
Despite messy effects that make the eyes ache, you’d have to be a real sour square not to at least give the actors respect for their sense of humour. The original Mrs O’Connell, Rachel Weisz, apparently turned down the option to take up her former role, citing problems with the script: that is a laugh in itself, considering how poor the two she did show up for were. But it’s a shame because she has chemistry on screen, and her replacement, Maria Bello, takes her role far too seriously.
Try not to think about how much this film cost to make – to do so is too depressing – and imagine it is a 1950s B-movie.
When viewed in such a manner, it’s almost passable fare. |
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