Escapism doesn’t come easy. The skill to make The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor enjoyable isn’t here. It’s a shame since the first in this series was one of the most spirited things in that era’s CGI overkill.
This third Mummy is directed by workman action director Rob Cohen. Having made the attractive, loud and neon The Fast and the Furious into one of the decade’s major teen market movies, Cohen doesn’t find the same B-movie energy with The Mummy, turning it into a poor Hollywood stab at Hong Kong action and Saturday matinee serials.
It’s no help that the script is garbage. As Rick O’Connell, Brendan Fraser’s hapless comic hero charm is buried under Mummy 3‘s assumption that it’s funnier than it is. Overloaded with bad one-liners, the pacing is all over the place: compelling in brief stretches, but full of dull exposition, and least engaging in its action scenes. An attempt to thwart the resurrection of evil Emperor Han (Jet Li), who was melted into chocolate pudding and then turned to stone by a good witch (Michelle Yeoh), brings the characters to China, but the group dynamic never gels. Maria Bello’s English accent makes her performance feel like high-minded theatre. Rick’s son Alex (Luke Ford) is in university, suffering from The O.C. condition where he looks seven years younger than his parents.
Mummy 3 isn’t automatically fun just by virtue of having no brain.
This article appears in Aug 7-13, 2008.