Light as popcorn without butter, the third entrée in the "Mummy" franchise is munchable summer fare that goes down easy, staving off hunger for a while but not exactly satisfying.
After the fun but forgettable "The Mummy" in 1999 and the less fun, more forgettable "The Mummy Returns" in 2001, it's time to watch more ancient corpses come to life amid digital effects laid on with a trowel. Again with the endless chases and the undead pulling their skeletons together to do battle, only to be stopped by swashbuckling heroes who can break the spell.
Tiresome and messy, "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor" borrows mightily from the "Indiana Jones" franchise and various martial-arts films, not to mention Frank Capra's 1937 "Lost Horizon," but it doesn't do what those films did nearly as well. Director Rob Cohen and writers Alfred Gough and Miles Millar seem determined to water it down to globs of plot, strung between shapeless action sequences and humorless repartee. Only martial-arts superstar Jet Li triumphs as the mostly wordless evil Emperor Han of ancient China, a glowing magma spirit locked in a terra cotta shell.
Archaeologist/tomb-raider Rick O'Connell (Brendan Fraser) and his adventurer-writer wife, Evelyn (Maria Bello, replacing Rachel Weisz from the previous films), live in bored retirement in 1946 England. They're thrilled when the government asks them to deliver a priceless gem to a Shanghai museum. Meanwhile, their son, Alex (Luke Ford), has dropped out of college and gone on a dig in China, discovering the emperor's mummy encased in a huge terra cotta sculpture. We learn in a long prologue that it was a sorceress (Michelle Yeoh) who put the emperor and his men under a spell.
When the curse is accidentally lifted, the emperor, joined by a rebel Chinese army, rushes to the Himalayas, where a dip in a pool in Shangri-La promises immortality. He already has supernatural powers and likes to turn himself into a three-headed dragon. Accompanying the O’Connells is Evelyn’s eccentric, wisecracking brother Jonathan (John Hannah), who during the flight to the mountains is vomited on by a yak.
The kindest thing to be said for this frantic, cluttered mess of cheesy computer-generated action-adventure clichés is that at least you can see how the estimated $175 million budget (according to the Internet Movie Database) was spent. We get an avalanche, an army of bow-and-arrow-wielding skeletons, a car chase that turns into a fireworks explosion, and a cadre of snowy yetis. In the movie’s futile drive to conjure visceral excitement, the action sequences are edited into an incoherent jumble that makes you feel trapped on a rickety airplane sitting in a pool of yak vomit.
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After the fun but forgettable "The Mummy" in 1999 and the less fun, more forgettable "The Mummy Returns" in 2001, it's time to watch more ancient corpses come to life amid digital effects laid on with a trowel. Again with the endless chases and the undead pulling their skeletons together to do battle, only to be stopped by swashbuckling heroes who can break the spell.
Tiresome and messy, "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor" borrows mightily from the "Indiana Jones" franchise and various martial-arts films, not to mention Frank Capra's 1937 "Lost Horizon," but it doesn't do what those films did nearly as well. Director Rob Cohen and writers Alfred Gough and Miles Millar seem determined to water it down to globs of plot, strung between shapeless action sequences and humorless repartee. Only martial-arts superstar Jet Li triumphs as the mostly wordless evil Emperor Han of ancient China, a glowing magma spirit locked in a terra cotta shell.
Archaeologist/tomb-raider Rick O'Connell (Brendan Fraser) and his adventurer-writer wife, Evelyn (Maria Bello, replacing Rachel Weisz from the previous films), live in bored retirement in 1946 England. They're thrilled when the government asks them to deliver a priceless gem to a Shanghai museum. Meanwhile, their son, Alex (Luke Ford), has dropped out of college and gone on a dig in China, discovering the emperor's mummy encased in a huge terra cotta sculpture. We learn in a long prologue that it was a sorceress (Michelle Yeoh) who put the emperor and his men under a spell.
When the curse is accidentally lifted, the emperor, joined by a rebel Chinese army, rushes to the Himalayas, where a dip in a pool in Shangri-La promises immortality. He already has supernatural powers and likes to turn himself into a three-headed dragon. Accompanying the O’Connells is Evelyn’s eccentric, wisecracking brother Jonathan (John Hannah), who during the flight to the mountains is vomited on by a yak.
The kindest thing to be said for this frantic, cluttered mess of cheesy computer-generated action-adventure clichés is that at least you can see how the estimated $175 million budget (according to the Internet Movie Database) was spent. We get an avalanche, an army of bow-and-arrow-wielding skeletons, a car chase that turns into a fireworks explosion, and a cadre of snowy yetis. In the movie’s futile drive to conjure visceral excitement, the action sequences are edited into an incoherent jumble that makes you feel trapped on a rickety airplane sitting in a pool of yak vomit.
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