Three stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for plenty of grody action violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.1.08
Buy DVD: The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
• Buy Blu-Ray: The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (Deluxe Edition) [Blu-ray]
I have learned, over the years, to diminish my expectations when movies open in a particular manner:
• In a psychiatrist's office (only bad thrillers and horror flicks do this);
• With a voice-over prologue inserted to compensate for eleventh-hour editing that rendered the storyline incomprehensible;
 |
| Facing a veritable army of re-animated terra cotta soldiers, Rick and Evelyn O'Connell (Brendan Fraser and Maria Bello) are relived (?) when their small band of defenders is joined by thousands of revenge-seeking skeletons long-buried beneath the Great Wall of China. |
The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor falls into the latter category, although this is by no means its only flaw.
Action director Rob Cohen — taking over this franchise from creator Stephen Sommers, who helmed the first two entries — has delivered precisely the cartoon one would expect from the guy who brought us The Fast and the Furious
and XXX
. Cohen behaves like a second-unit stunt director; he rarely wastes time with trifles such as plot logic or characterization, preferring instead to charge from one frantic chase or fight scene to the next. His films are breathless examples of cinematic whiplash, which I suppose is fine for the video game set, but less so for everybody else. Cohen obviously never learned the wisdom of pacing, or of balancing the frantic stuff with calmer scenes, so that viewers might relax for a moment and then better appreciate the next thrilling rush.
A nonstop diet of anything becomes tiresome, and that's the major problem with this Mummy: It never lets up, and that's boring. Older fans will recall that this misjudgment also plagued Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
, which similarly went from one crazed action sequence to the next, with nary a pause for reflection or — God forbid — character development. Then, too, scripters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar subscribe to the mistaken notion that anything goes in fantasy, and that consistency therefore is nothing more than a word in the dictionary, somewhere between clumsy and crummy. That's a newbie writing mistake, because of course the opposite is true: If we're to care a whit for the heroes and villains in fantasies, then they must be granted consistent strengths and weaknesses.
It simply doesn't work, as is the case here, when the villain can surmount any situation by suddenly whipping up some new power, such as morphing into a three-headed dragon. Nor is the situation helped by the sudden appearance of a magical knife — the only weapon that can defeat him! — that springs up out of nowhere, introduced by one character as an afterthought apparently inserted into the fifth draft of page 35.
Mostly, though, this Mummy doesn't work because too many key actors can't inhabit the movie.
