Movie Review: The Mummy Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

    

The Mummy Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor
2008, 112mins, PG-13
Director: Rob Cohen
writer (s): Alfred Gough, Miles Millar
Cast includes: Brendan Fraser, Maria Bello, Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh, Luke Ford, John Hannah
Release Date: 1st August 2008

It’s official The Mummy 3 is the worst film of the summer season so far. The first two Mummy films where far from great but thanks to solid direction and good performances from Brendan Fraser, John Hannah and Rachel Weisz they were always fun. Sadly here Weisz doesn’t return and her replacement is terrible whilst Fraser and Hannah really haven’t got their hearts in it, so combining that with the banal and excessive direction of Rob Cohen this ends up as a truly horrible mess.
The film looks cheap for a so called blockbuster, and the story unlike the originals doesn’t so much homage Indiana Jones and the monster movies of old but rather rips them off in the most evil and unappealing manner. The picture opens with the audience being force fed exposition about the pictures villain, the evil emperor Han (Jet Li) who after a bout of serious tyranny was cursed by an old wizard (Michelle Yeoh) and overturned. Now Alex (Luke Ford) son of famous globe trotters Eve (Maria Bello) and Rick O’ Connell (Brendan Fraser) has awakened the slumbering emperor in his tomb and once again he wishes to raise his army and take the world by force. Rick and Eve come out of retirement to help their son put an end to the new mummy’s attempted reign of terror, with the help of various locals and Eve’s cowardly sibling Jonathan (John Hannah).
The performances in this picture are for the most part lame and unwatchable. Fraser does just a passable job and like Johnny Depp was last summer in Pirates, he looks bored with playing this character for a third time. Still he’s far better than anyone else particularly the new comers Maria Bello and Luke Ford, both of who are dismal on the big screen. Bello does have a handful of decent performances to her name but her attempt here will be a CV haunter for years to come, and fresh faced but entirely wooden Ford will be lucky to work again. Jet Li’s character is a CGI creation for most of the films run but even when the martial arts master is on screen he’s poor and thus his villain is totally unmemorable. Michelle Yeoh is thrown a completely dud part, probably cast purely so she could face off between Li and John Hannah is left making crappy wise cracks on the side. The Hannah character was written up some pretty good gags in the last two films but here more or less just like everything else, his attempts at comic relief are shoddy and disappointing.
Visually the picture is totally unremarkable and for a Summer event movie the CGI work is unusually torrid. We see the family move from location to location but they all feels like half baked studio sets and the various monsters and magic encountered on the way are really weakly thought out and unoriginal. In this sense the film is inexcusable in its awfulness, even weakish Summer pictures like Journey To The Center Of The Earth and The Happening reflect in their look that a studio has plumped up cash. The Mummy 3 is as cheap and dissatisfying a motion picture experience your likely to have in a theatre this year.
The action sequences are all tepid and unexciting; the finale in particular even manages to be an anticlimax despite the 90 minutes of crud that have proceeded it. In many ways it riffs heavily on The Mummy Returns and whilst that films finish was likely its weakest point, it still looks sweet compared to what is on offer here. Rob Cohen has no talent for visuals or storytelling and so he should be steered clear of all projects such as this and stick to directing tweenie pop videos and commercials. The man appears incapable of  pacing a scene, excite the audience or provide a memorable moment based on this giant insult of a movie, and seeing as he was also behind 2005’s mindless tech thriller Stealth, my claims are not founded purely on this one. All other aspects range between forgettable to poor including Randy Edelman’s score and the undistinguished cinematography, whilst the dialogue is woeful but that wasn’t as surprising as the other negative points.
The film might find some success at the Box-Office but it is worth remembering the series last entry was seven years ago and a new group of multiplexers has emerged. I’m sure they’ve seen the 1999 and 2001 films on DVD and video but one ponders has to how keen they would be to go out and watch the film in the cinema, when Batman and Will Smith are playing in the screens beside. That also coupled with the utter poverty of quality on show might just prevent this from being a hit, indeed if it doesn’t do well in week 1 it hasn’t a chance of recovering because word of mouth will be dire. It combines a bad script, poor plot, unenthusiastic cast and a director who with every films seems to be getting weaker in the hope making a hit? I mean I know most blockbusters aren’t great but the studio head who greenlit this one was completely in the mood for a hit and run mission, a quick cash grab at the Box-Office with the hope this turd will be soon forgotten. The film will however be in alot of critics bottom 10 of the year list (and it looks likely to be high on mine) so the bad publicity should continue on for this one, hopefully permanently tarnishing the careers of all who saw fit to get involved. The Mummy 3 isn’t just a waste of money or time, the celluloid it’s printed on is wasting up space on the planet. Yes, it really is that bad.