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At Comic-Con International, Carly shows off her Rocket Llama sticker while standing in front of terracotta warriors from The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
Well, it’s a movie. If you want a synopsis, go somewhere else. They’re all over the place. I have specific thoughts to share (vent), and here they are.
The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor starts off slow, too slow, but picks up speed and becomes a very watchable, never dull bit of cinema with some interesting ideas and clever visuals that might have been more impressive had the movie managed to seize us earlier like the series’ previous installments.
In The Mummy (1999), Rick and Evie played by Brenden Fraser and Rachel Weiss fell in love while fighting the wizard-turned-mummy Imotep (Arnold Vosloo). When we saw them next in The Mummy Returns (2001), only two years later for us, they’d gotten older with an adventurous, preconcious son Alex. And now we find them at the start of what is essentially The Mummy 3, retired while their grown son is off in China getting into archeological adventure of his own. The charm of the young lovers is gone, and with it has flown much of this series’s charm. At least the film addressed that these characters had enjoyed many other non-magical adventures with espionage and other sorts of derring-do during the strangely long intervals between their encounters with mummies.
It has its points, but it has problems. Foreshadowing frequently is either heavyhanded or absent. In the thick of battle, out of nowhere come the Yeti as white furry deux ex machina-slash-calvary to save the day. They had never been mentioned and were never mentioned again. And their inexplicable arrival wasn’t even a surprise because the commercials for the movie had given that away.
Too many things just make no sense. Where did the Emperor get all those powers? Imhotep had been a wizard, but not this guy. Distrusting Dragon Emperor Hand (Jet Li), the sorceress Zi Juan (Michelle Yeoh) whose magic granted him his immortality, had rigged her spell so that if he betrayed her, the magic would turn against him (and of course he betrayed, for reasons somewhat unclear). He’d asked for immorality. This magic-wielding woman who never trusted him would not have thrown in shapeshifting and other superpowers just for the fun of it.
These plot points aren’t as big an issue as the low energy level. There is no chemistry between Alex O’Connell (Luke Ford) and mummy-fighting heroine Lin (Isabella Leong) even though other characters keep claiming there is. In the role of Evie, Maria Bello is stiff. When Rachel Weiss walked, that character had a bob in her step. As played by Bello, she does not. The twinkle is gone from Evie’s part as Bello goes through the motions. The only actors returning from the previous films, Brendan Fraser as Rick and John Hannah as Evie’s ne’er-do-well brother Jonathan Carnahan, barely interact.
Stephen Sommers, who wrote and directed the first two films, only produced this one — not that deeper involvement form him would necessarily have helped (see Van Helsing).
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