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I’m all about the details when it comes to The Mummy Returns, so let’s get down to business. This is the essence of summer movies, a festive time at the multiplex, but it’s not without a few (million) scars. Here’s the lowdown:

Visuals: wow. I kept reasoning, whimsically, that if I were just a few years younger, say around age 12 or below, this could have been one of my favorite movies. There’s as much to look at here as there was in Star Wars, and the technical feats are equally as outstanding. Alas, I’m wizened enough to know bad jokes when I hear them and structural weaknesses in stories when a movie hopscotches along them the whole time, so this experience comes close, but flies too close to the sun of entertainment perfection on wings of inherently blank script pages, polished to a fine sheen of audience-friendly goodness, but lacking in fundamental heart and soul. It’s more like a mirage – wonderful-looking, and just what you want from far away, but the feelings are illusory, and up-close, when put to the test, it turns out to be a whole lot of nothing. The movie could’ve been more real, more founded on convictions than simply eager to please unconditionally, but then again, there was never any such higher ground promised by anyone involved in this cinematic production. It guaranteed fun, and delivered. We can all appreciate that, even if the utilitarian John Stuart Mill inside us all refuses to accept this victor of the senses-based grading curve, this evader of the intellectual “higher” pleasures, and tries to snap us out of it with the lure of a thoughtful poem by Dickinson or an old Ingmar Bergman classic. Sometimes it’s just about throwing those darts, and looking at a lot of FX-caked movie frames...

...while other times our inner maturity and refinement just can’t take it: I hate artificially cute kids. Damn Spielberg and your precious marketing, it’s your fault the Precocious Tyke is now an imperative device in big, Hollywood fanfare pics like these. A villain (Locknah, played by Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbage, and anyone brave enough to keep a name like that in the plastic world of Hollywood deserves to have it mentioned) who ordinarily wouldn’t have been allowed more than three minutes of screen time is fleshed out to serve as Idiot Kid’s foil once he’s kidnapped. This man endures all kinds of humiliation but is compensated by getting to act tough sometimes, and in the end he’s Ardeth Bay’s match (since every good guy in the movie has his/her own equivalent bad guy to fight, except for Jonathan, who takes a crack at the mummy’s girlfriend – and I appreciated the internal joke of that pairing – but eventually requires saving). Akinnuoye-Agbage ain’t no thespian, either, but his menacing act thwomps Freddie Boath’s performance at every turn. The kid is a pox; maybe if he had 50% less lines in the script, with an 85% reduction in range (just let him talk like a zombie, anything to avoid a 7-year-old pretending he has the capacity for sarcasm; none of them do, face it Hollywood; you wouldn’t give grandpa a set of ninja stars and make him a karate champ, so don’t put kids to the test of acting outside their age boundaries, either), it’s possible some part of his character could’ve been salvaged. On the outset, Boath/Alex is a normal boy, and sure, it might be interesting to see the differences in reaction to these far-out situations between adults and children, but c’mon, it’s not that interesting, nor is that even the intent of the movie. He’s the poster boy for youth marketing, with all the trappings of a gee whiz Jake Lloyd, and try to remember how competently the Jingle All the Way kid turned out in his blockbuster debut. Perhaps because of his British accent (look at Anthony Hopkins – it’s a certified endowment of class), Boath isn’t quite the inoperative little munchkin that Jake Lloyd fizzled out as (taking down with him several generations worth of idolatry and respect for the icon of Darth Vader), and at least Boath doesn’t have the eternal voice of James Earl Jones to live up to. But get all the scenes in a row and picking out the worst ones will be impressively similar to picking out all those featuring Alex

As his parents, Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz look older. Not in a derogatory, “for every Sean Connery who grows old with grace there’s about 50 Elizabeth Taylors who should be banned from public viewership after the age of 45” sorta way; I mean that flatteringly. It’s continuity details like this that give the movie some extra credit. In a way I wish they hadn’t moved the story ahead a whole eight years, though, when the actual two that passed would’ve been fine, and it would’ve negated the only point of his time leap, which is to make Indy, Jr.’s role believable. As Evelyn, Weisz is more congenial, less dorky this time. Her character has grown from the whiny, victimized, I’m-so-cute rebel-rouser she behaved as the first time. She’s even sexier (she rubbed me the wrong way before, so I should say sexy at last), and, thanks to some half-baked plot finagling (this is the only reason why they bothered making her a reincarnation), Weisz got to spend time with a trainer during filming for some fight scenes of her own (the one I remember best is when she and Anck-su-namun play with sais) that are fast-paced and well-choreographed (the use of stunt doubles is seamless) without being edited to ribbons or trapped in too many close-ups and fancy angles. So: Rachel Weisz is better. Not as reliant on charm, so part of Evie’s pluckiness is gone, but she’s more matured and genuinely likable. Rick, on the other hand, is the same heroic center; you can feel the Batman 2-4-esque weight on his shoulders, as he struggles to stand out as the main character in a story that has been flooded with increasingly important supporting players. Like the Penguin & Catwoman, the Riddler & Two-Face, and Mr. Freeze & Poison Ivy, Imhotep & the Scorpion King are both major villains (even if the latter doesn’t have a big part, he’s still talked about constantly – and in foreboding tones, no less), and it’s easy to see that in his attempt to not just repeat the original’s recipe but to multiply it exponentially (as dictated in the Sequel Handbook: thou shalt beget twice the ingredients + thrice the scope of thine forebear), Sommers deliberately gave us two larger-than-life evils to enjoy. It’s a fun accentuation of excitement, too, just as having not just Catwoman but the Penguin as well to follow up the Joker’s solo act was a bonus to Batfans (too bad they didn’t play around with the villain quantity for part 3, although seeing as how stupidly the jump to 3 villains was in Batman and Robin – does anyone having anything nice to say about Bane? – let’s not be hasty). Rick still chows down on more screen time than anyone else, but, like poor Batman, he’s the exact same person he ever was/will be, and most often just an afterthought (seeing him fight Imhotep at the end was weird, for example, as I almost expected someone more important to face off against the main bad guy). It may just be that Sommers loaded up his script with so many characters – and there’s nothing wrong with that; certainly, ensembles can be just as entertaining as a simple 2-against-1 format – but does anyone remember the middle years of “Spin City”? 15+ people stuffed into those few sets, most of them used only in arbitrary ways in order to justify their paychecks (since the typical 2-plot paradigm requires only five people at most per episode). Same with soap operas after they’ve been on for a few too many years. In The Mummy Returns, in addition to Rick, Evie, Imhotep, Jonathan, Ardeth Bay, and a more prominent Anck-su-namun, meet Alex (Rick, Jr.)., the Scorpion King, harried daycare specialist Locknah, Michael Ironside-lookalike expedition leader bad guy, and balloon-flying black stereotype guy. All of which, upon inspection, shows that most of these people were in the 1999 Mummy, meaning that it too was an overcrowded affair; but it didn’t feel that way, and mostly, neither does this one. My gripe is that some characters (like Rick, who’s supposed to be paramount) get pushed aside, not plot-wise but in terms of their personalities. Rick falls into superhero mode (he rarely gets hurt, and performs a number of amazing physical achievements that I won’t spoil, if only because they’re so ridiculous you have to see for yourself) and doesn’t shine as a person so much as a reliable standard for decency and ass-kicking. Lots of jokes, still, but not much individuality. Fraser milks – or is forced into by virtue of having little other talent that he chooses to exploit – the role of Square-jaw McGruff, and once again tries to seem comfortable knowing that he can’t (or absolutely won’t) break out of this mold. We can keep calling him jovial, solid, and other medium compliments (until he makes Monkeybone 2 and we exile him to Easter Island), and he certainly has all those qualities, but at the core, he’s not an original character, not in this movie nor in many others. More suited to playing amorphous superhero stiffs like Superman and Dick Tracy – or, in consideration of Fraser’s on-again/off-again trademark slapstick, Dudley Do-Right and George of the Jungle – his limits have rarely been tested (The Passion of Darkly Noon and Gods and Monsters, maybe, but neither was that far a leap, when half the performance both times called for him to stare at someone or something), and whether or that’s the right way for him to be surfing the wave of stardom (maybe he really doesn’t have anything else to show us, so hides – not so inconspicuously – in the shadows of typecasting), we might never learn. I’d be content to watch him lead the next 20 Mummy expeditions into the middle of this century, until his age renders him less befitting an action hero than Charles Bronson in Death Wish 35: I Wish I Was Dead, but it wouldn’t even occur to me to compare his Rick with as memorable an ace as Harrison Ford’s Dr. Jones, for example. He’s like the friend you have who doesn’t belong in your closest circle of friends, and probably never will, but who you distinguish enough to consider worth keeping in contact with

Speaking of jokes (as Rick, that’s Fraser’s specialty), I implore anyone to dare count the number of facetious, referential ironies in the dialogue. You know the kind – heard in most action movies, not to mention about every 13 seconds on “Buffy” – in which something important/extremely dangerous is being discussed/taking place, and someone will say something like “oh, the Apocalypse again. Big deal”, thereby shrinking its significance into the size and consequence of a punchline. It’s a postmodern technique, a clean way to avoid being sincere for too long (it’s largely known throughout Hollywood that we the audience are uncomfortable with reality, and will reject the faintest visage of melodrama and hyperbole unless it’s explicitly chopped into humorous fodder for our easy-to-swallow consumption), and, when done properly (i.e. for a long time on “Buffy”), it’s a clever bit. When done lazily, it just makes the movie look overly self-deprecating and smug, to a point where you want to smack it for being so falsely modest and just for cheap laughs. Not unlike a lot of people in real life, in fact. Another, similar, problem is the Speed 2/Bullock condition, roughly defined as the complacent force of habit pertaining to previous experience with recurring circumstances. In the unforgettable Cruise Control, Sandra “The Joke’s Always Been on Me” Bullock made it her highest priority to comment on the familiarity of her foil-the-terrorist exploits, to jauntily brush it off with lines like “There’s a bomb on the ship? Puh-leeze, like I don’t have enough of my mind right now!”, than to, y’know, act like what’s going on is serious and demands her complete, un-ironic attention and participation. Same deal with Mummy 2: by the time Rick spouts his 30th “Aw, I hate mummies!” in that tone that’s deliberately more annoyed and adorably whiny than concerned or afraid, I was ready for a fan-fic look at some undead creature eating Brendan Fraser’s face. We get it, all right: these characters have been through these adventures before. The movie tries to acknowledge its regurgitated nature, saying “Look, I’m unoriginal and I know it! Therefore, it’s okay!” But at this point after Scream popularized the art of self-satire, I think it’s time for a break, and if not that, then at least a new approach – have the actor break that ever-weaker fourth wall, stare directly at the audience and deliver a Power Point presentation on what’s going to happen and how explaining it this way is so darned cute in its knowing lack of creativity! Or just tone it the fuck down, wise guys

There’s more humor than in The Mummy Returns from 1933, and is now played by the 2nd coming of Darkman, but its quality hasn’t improved over the 2-year lull. At best the laughs top off in the “ardent chuckle” zone (John Hannah garners the lion’s share, with Locknah the Magnificent coming in a distant second with his kooky expressions of wide-eyed frustration); at worst the intended hilarity feels redundant, inappropriate, and just feeble; more often than not, it reaches a middle ground: pleasant to the overall tone. A lighthearted monster movie (can this series still officially use that slogan?) is better than a dark, austere one. Especially for those precious ticket sales, but pardon my cynicism

The relationship between Rick and Evie is, gladly, one of the few story pieces that Sommers holds true to in the move to Sequelsville. Rather than repackage that of the original, as he seems to have done with most everything else, Sommers follows their natural advancement beyond the bickering stage of blossoming love and settles them into a happy marriage, making their ingrained union seem more real, more satisfying to those who have loyally followed the gang from movie 1 to movie 2 (which isn’t necessarily me, since I liked but didn’t love the other one, but I always prize the intelligent treatment of, well, anything), and, in terms of Sommers’ Mummy universe, more progressive, whereas all else (Jonathan’s wimpy selfishness, Ardeth Bay’s esoteric sidekick-yness, the tendency of greedy expeditions to unleash ancient horrors, et al) stays stagnant. It would’ve been easy to split the couple in-between films (i.e. the transition of the public’s attitude towards the Ghostbusters from 1 to 2), the better to fleece the same formula of them slowly but surely falling in love (all over again) in the sequel, and though, from a cynic’s perspective, it’s possible that Sommers only did took the road slightly-less-traveled in an act of laziness to avoid coming up with a more challenging arc in their association (or maybe he was just too busy juggling so many other story ideas), this is still preferable to whatever more ritualistic alternative that could have been.

In addition, there’s more plot, and by more I mean way way (way?) too much. If the first one was just a skeleton of a story, call The Mummy Returns hideously obese. One might argue the hypocrisy of film critics complaining about overplotting when they devote so many of their written words to roasting the poverty of most cinematic tales told these days, but there has be a compromise. Good screenwriting isn’t a surplus of story, nor a scarcity; it’s the perfect amount. The Mummy Returns goes slightly overboard, not knowing quite when to close up shop, nor how, when, and obviously why to enforce doses of moderation. Here’s the deal: the Scorpion King is a pathetic loser in battle; centuries later the reincarnation of Imhotep the Mummy’s love leads a group of miscellaneous baddies to resurrect her boyfriend, so that a) she can be reunited with him in their time-defying passion, and b) he can kill the Scorpion King, who she is also going to conjure back to life. To be killed. No no no, let me not mislead you; I think I remember someone mentioning that the Scorpion King is set to make his big comeback pretty soon, so reviving his spirit for Imhotep to pound on will both avert this apocalypse and turn over its power to Imhotep himself. That’s the premise, upon which about 634 plot points, crises, complications, and reverses are stacked, until both the Mummy and the Rock are vanquished once and for all/a few more years. Characters (not just one, but in some cases several, if not all) are kidnapped, killed then brought back to life, revealed to have Very Important past lives and family histories (that are coincidentally congruous to the story at hand), and put in peril, with only seconds to spare when they are rescued by another character. Actually, that last one takes place about every minute and a half. The elaborate composition of this movie is impressive in theory, and necessary of course to the rhythmic rule that all sequels must have more, more, MORE than before, but in the long run, it’s somewhat unnecessary. Do we need two gigantic Braveheart battles? Not really. Both of them look really outstanding; the simulation of thousands and thousands of soldiers fighting in one mass of chaos is quite breathtaking, but when you’ve seen one, you’ve seen The Mall, especially when the opportunity to make the two wars somehow co-linear (by, perhaps, allowing The Rock to lead the final fight in addition to the opening one, with similar forces and motives bridging the expansive time difference – hello, Mrs. Theme, how are you doing this evening? Those new sprinklers working out for ya? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Okay, sorry, guess I’ll see you later. Or not)...as I was saying, especially when the chance the connect them somehow for a more meaningful justification isn’t even conceived of. Your lack of shame was adequately transparent with the wall of sand chasing a biplane vs. the wall of water chasing a helicopter scenes, Sommers; ripping off your own movie within itself, and allowing this subplot to end in virtually the same way (as in, the same side gets royally ass-fucked twice) takes this behavior to new, undefined levels. I can only imagine Revenge of the Son of the Mummy’s Evil Aborted Fetus, whereupon the audience gets 11 car chases, 6 fake deaths, 47 main characters, 100 consecutive apocalypses, a dozen love triangles (including one involving a CG-rendered Andre the Giant as an Egyptian God, Cindy Margolis as a warrior princess, and Parker Posey as her forbidden lover/gypsy whore), and 5 suspenseful “wall of maple syrup chasing a pogo stick” moments

The FX, by the way, are 99% impeccable, an incredible percentage considering that the amount of visually-enhanced shots must total in the 4-digit range. The only noticeably fake blunders were in the beginning, when an army invades a temple (a long shot of them charging towards it shows how false and identical the motion of all their legs look), and a phony The Rock face on a huge scorpion body. The scorpion carries on with flawless verisimilitude (for being a monstrous arthropod, that is), but his face is too cartoonish to take seriously. Which is all the same when you get down to it, since watching Dwayne “The Hulk” Johnson trying to act in the prologue (or just beginning...I don’t even remember them showing us the name of the movie) made it hard not to scream in disbelief. Can one man truly be this unintentionally funny at pretending to be someone with barely a nuance’s difference than someone that he usually portrays pretty convincingly? The Rock, professional wrestler, stretches himself for the role of the Scorpion King, professional warrior and analogous enforcer of raucous violence and shouting, about as much as if Robert Downey, Jr. were to reprise the character of downward-spiraling addict Julian from 1987’s Less Than Zero for an off-Broadway comeback. And yet The Rock still acts like a goof who can barely comprehend how to stand on his feet, much less make a normal facial expression. That this is the result of so very little screen time (less than three minutes) and only about one line of dialogue (in another language!) brings us to some kind of unfavorable conclusion about this guy, who in interviews comes off as a sexy hunk and a respectable tough guy, but who resorts to the weakest facets of his stupid wrestling persona to channel in a nothing role for the movie. I owe Andrew Shue an apology: maybe there is someone worse than you, buddy! And for once, I don’t mean that simply as a left hook to your sister, “How to Rise to Adventures in Babysitting and fall to The Saint in 10 years” Elisabeth (and why would I: she can be charming when not flaming a see-through Kevin Bacon or playing a retard). If this is the crap we’re to expect from the Scorpion King’s forthcoming, self-titled spinoff film, and not the normalized, resemblance-of-an-actual-human-being masculinity of his real life style (which I would rather watch any day), I can only hope, despite the casting of Michael Clarke Duncan, that it bombs, neutralizing The Rock’s career until he gets his act together. In all fairness, however, at least he doesn’t do the eyebrow thing in The Mummy Returns, or choke anyone with a rattle snake wearing a spiked leather mask. Still, my only consolation for this experience was its brevity (and the excellent, no-holds-barred use of special effects during it, but Sommers probably uses that on all the girls)

Other observations:

~ The sanctity of death gets a hearty caning this time around, worse than in most horror/action films. At one point Jonathan finds himself fleeing enemies alongside one of his own enemies, a troop in the opposing side (cue brief, comical Unlikely Union scenario). They think they’ve found safety when Jonathan insists they’re on sacred ground that will protect them, until the hapless bad guy he’s with gets impaled in the chest, to which the ever-realistic fictional creation known as Jonathan sheepishly gestures and replies, “Sorry – my mistake” then runs off. ‘Cuz when you’re responsible for someone’s death, it a laff riot! The audience I was with got a kick out of that one. Another scene around this time features one of the (several) main villains getting gruesomely murdered by a certain king of reptilian creatures..., and evidently, due to the shocking procedure of his death (along with his comical cowardice), this is another big laugh for the masses. When all I could do was feel sorry for this pathetic man who was begging for mercy before having his body torn asunder. Ho ho...ho? No. The only serious treatment of mortality comes when a main good person dies (seemingly, of course). And even then, you don’t see much tears from the family which bared witness. The callousness rages on throughout the movie, revealing above all the things the go-for-broke, entertain-at-all-costs attitude wielded a little too carelessly by Stephen Sommers. Death can be funny, as we saw in Indiana Jones and other such fare, but it’s a tricky line to play on. Speaking of human emotions, after Alex is kidnapped, there is the requisite worry and sadness from Rick and Evie, but in one of the scenes that bookends the disappearance of their only child and a tender moment later on in which Evie tells how she misses him so, there’s oodles of innocent flirtation and wackiness between the couple, as if they have nothing else on their minds besides their love and the fancy of an adventure.

~ Oded Fehr is a Zen-master nut. From his dialogue to his face paint, Ardeth Bay is so unchanged from Mummy 1 that I have reason to believe stock footage of him from it was used on multiple occasions. But it’s gotta be better for a man’s career to be whomping on dog-monster warriors in giant blockbusters than to be threatening Rob Schneider in a movie that uses the word “he-bitch” more than 10 times in less than 90 minutes. Oh my, aren’t I clever for making such a long-winded analogy?! (the exclamation point helps clarify that statement as being more rhetoric than literally inquisitive. More words!) Sometimes I really hate myself. Let’s move on…but not before I give due props to Oded Fehr. Like his castmates, he may not have much invested in the role, and you can’t blame him, but there’s never a point where you laugh or wince at, or wish to bring issue with, any way he plays the part. He is finely serviceable

~ The early scene of the mummies chasing the prop bus went on for too long. After a while the duels between human and mummy would slow down to the occasional punch-and-miss, like the characters themselves are running out of steam, while the scene struggles to conclude

~ The mummified pygmy critters make for the best action sequence. The Lost World set-up is in-your-face – teams crossing through shoulder-high thicket are pulled down into the sea of shrubbery by mysterious assailants, leading to a kinetic ambush – yet the dark jungle scenery is perfect for this kind of movie, establishing a dreamlike throwback to adventures you imagined yourself having as a kid, and the bad guys are just fast ‘n’ furious and inhuman-looking enough in all their computer-generated glory to savor

~ He who pilots the gang’s old-school balloon substitutes for the wacky mustache guy who fatally flew the plane in the last movie. They even lead the same action set-piece: old white guy helped them out when the wall of sand was following them in Part 1, and goosey black guy helps them out when the wall of [water] follows them in Part 2. Albert suggested that having him replaced by the hilarious yet underused comedian-actor Dave Chappelle would’ve lent more amusement to the stock character, and I got all moist in the old rods-n-cones just pondering the return of Pinball (Dave in Con Air). There’s even a striking resemblance between Dave and the more exotic (read: with British accent) counterpart who central casting ended up hiring for the thankless job, and who, like Oded Fehr, performs adequately, but the part is so underwritten that he doesn’t stand out at all. Oh well. Meanwhile, Dave’s packing in all the great acting gigs for future releases, I hope. He’s gonna win an Oscar someday, just you watch. Or at least a much-deserved American Comedy Award. Or maybe just a Presidential pardon for his Half-Baked script. But he’s one of the funniest celebrities I’ve ever seen (yes, even in Half-Baked). Just had to wedge that in

~ Like a broken record I go on...the score isn’t memorable, but it’s adventuresome. Half Indiana Jones, half Stargate, all exciting and/or ominous horns and drums

The truth is, this is a fantastic movie for those who appreciate entertainment. If you’re one of those film school know-it-alls whose to-see list for 2001 consists only of Memento and A.I. (but only because Kubrick’s paw prints are on it, natch), then stay away. This is one of those things that we layman call “fun”, and you just wouldn’t understand. All the bad stuff I wrote about The Mummy Returns in this extraneous review can be cast aside very easily; it’s only here because I couldn’t think of as many ways to say “cool FX” or find synonyms for “non-threatening, non-thrilling fun”. Everything about this movie is a delight; even The Rock, in his nakedly useless way, is fine (for a laugh at his expense). You’ll be glad the whole cast Returns, and you’ll thank Sommers for upping the action/supernatural ante. More eye candy, more characters, mo’ better blues. Bottom line: if you like Indiana Jones, there’s no reason to not like The Mummy 1999. And if you liked that movie, there’s no reason to not like The Mummy 2001. Indiana himself may be irreplaceable as one of our foremost personalities in movie history, and Short Round would kick Alex’s ass any day in the Year of the Scorpion or otherwise, but we now look to this new Mummy series to carry on the torch of adventure and fantasy left so long ago by Indy and Co. (as for the 3rd sequel in that franchise: yeah right. It’s been 12 years, and even if they started making it today, it’d be another 2-3 before it’s even released. And no sequel can stand so long a downtime without suffering some kind of crucial defect – Blues Brothers 2000?). So...yeah. The Mummy Returns is a good time

Final Grade = B+

And yes, that's a wrap

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originally posted: 05/09/01 11:02:40
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