The first big blockbuster of the summer and a record breaker of immense proportions in the US, The Mummy Returns was a sure-fire guaranteed hit regardless of reviews and comments This is good for Stepehen Sommers et al as it's pants. Few sequels live up to their originals but this one seemed strangely devoid of the wonder, fun and all-round edge-of-the-seat excitement so prevelant in 1999's The Mummy. The cast is all here, writer/director Sommers is back and the film 'seems' the same, at least superficially, but the magic caught in the original simply doesn't turn up.
The script itself is pretty dire. Beginning with a history lesson of sorts it details the fall and rise of The Scorpion King who, after being defeated in a long and bloody campaign against his enemies, sells his soul to the Egyptian god Anubis in return for command of his armies and one last victory. As a result said King is kept in a state of limbo waiting for the right idiots to come along and unearth him.
This is where our heroes come in. Rachel Weisz, Brendan Fraser, John Hannah, the gang's all here. Finding the long-lost bracelet of the Scorpion King they unwittingly return with it to London unaware that they are being chased by a cult who want said bracelet, a bracelet which if worn has the power to return the King to the earth at the head of Anubis's army, to them a very bad thing. While they set about trying to retrieve it from the now married O'Connell's they also find, ship and re-animate Imhotep in London, he being the only person they believe has the power to defeat the Scorpion King and put Anubis's army under their control. Or so I'm led to believe. The film itself wasn't overly clear on this point but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt as I really wasn't paying as much attention as I probably should have.
As a result thrills, spills and chills abound, sort of, as the film returns to Egypt and gathers momentum in the race to a sacred temple which will be THE place to be when all hell lets loose. And this is the problem. Not only does the film seem oddly like an identikit version of its first installment but it jumps about a bit, especially in the beginning, leaving you scratching your head as to the plausibility of what just happened. The first warning that this wasn't going to be quite as tightly plotted as you hoped was when the cult turns up at the O'Connell's mansion looking for the bracelet. They threaten Weisz and her child (the ok-ish Freddie Boath) and then lo and behold Madji warrior Ardeth Bey (Fehr) appears and helps her fight them off. The fact that he managed to track them from Egypt despite being more than a little suspicious looking and then turn up at the right (and very poorly edited) moment was the first in a long line of coincidental occurrences that made me and Richie look around with barely-concealed contempt.
Throw in some ridiculous and totally unnecessary reincarnation crap about Weisz and Fraser, an insanely impossible Madji army (several hundred thousand men and horses marching through the desert? Just think of the logistics...) and a lot of other annoying cliches (hero nearly gets killed but when we hear the shot it isn't him but his enemy who falls down dead) and you have a movie that you have to be in a particularly braindead mood to watch. And if there's one thing we here at DtheRH aren't is dumb. Honest. For me this was a classic example of trying to make a sequel with a larger budget and more special effects (the bigger is better approach) but losing the verve that the original had. One other thing, try to spot exactly where the film totally copies its predecessor or another film, the lazy rip-offs are in nearly every scene (think Star Wars). |
