MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR is a sad excuse for an action/adventure flick. Seeking box office gold with pretty good special effects and third-rate writing and failing spectacularly, that failure is in fact, the only spectacular thing happening on screen.
This third installment of what was once an entertaining if fluffy franchise attempts to spiff itself up by leaping headlong onto the Indiana Jones bandwagon. Egyptologist Evelyn O’Connell (Mario Bello replacing Rachel Weisz) and her adventurer husband Rick (still Brendan Fraser) are now in retirement in postwar England after helped with the war effort by being spies. Now, though, she pens bestselling books about evil mummies. He is attempting to learn the delicate art of fly fishing. Unbeknowst to them, their grown son, Alex (Luke Ford) is not busy with his studies at a university somewhere, he is in China unearthing the eponymous emperor’s tomb. Things converge when the British government asks the O’Connells to undertake one last assignment, taking the fabled Eye of Shangri-La diamond back to China. They leap at the chance, and not just because Evelyn’s ne’er do well brother, Jonathan (John Hannah) is running a club in Shanghai with an ancient Egyptian theme.
Of course the emperor isn’t as dead as he ought to be after 2000 years. Of course he was a ruthless dictator and plans on being one again. Of course there’s a curse involved. And of course there’s a Pool of Eternal Life that will grant the semi-undead emperor immortality. Those elements are a given in a film like this and to be honest, it would be a cheat to not have at least some of them. The problem is that the entire film seems to have been conceived around the action/special effect sequences, with the emphasis on the effects. The direction is indifferent, neither plodding, nor particularly sprightly, but maintaining an even keel that never bestirs itself beyond polite interest, even when rampaging hordes of clay soldiers are on the loose. That a climactic battle is against what is, at its most elemental level, an army of ambulatory pottery presents its own unique difficulties in staging, none of which are adequately addressed here.
The effects are bombastic. The emperor lobs fire, ice, and a bad attitude. Jet Li, as the emperor, certainly exudes the proper imperious attitude, but working as he does from beneath layers of makeup that emphasize the semi-dessicated and/or clay-like state of the pre-immortal monarch, body language is all he has to work with for most of the film. His martial arts prowess is criminally neglected until the end and even there fails to let Li truly dazzle. Explosions of both dynamite and fireworks, avalanches, yeti, and chases through a crowded Chinese New Year in Shanghai, for all the noise involved, it has a tired feel to it. As for the script, it’s the barest idea of a script rather than the real thing, and there is the unmistakable whiff of it having been thrown together as just so much filler between those action sequences, and not the good kind of whiff.
Fraser, Bello, Ford, and Hannah, along with Michelle Yeoh as the witch who curses the Emperor and Isabella Leong as the ninja with her own agenda, are game, but undone by a script that essentially gives them nothing interesting to say and that forces them to mouth exposition while running from danger. Hannah, in particular, is betrayed. The comic relief in all the films so far, here he is left with nothing really funny to say and a painfully low point involving a barfing yak. That both Fraser and Bello are technically old enough to have a college-aged son is no help in reconciling the astonishingly young-looking couple they are with the adult guy calling them mom and dad. Further, why a child raised in England has an American accent is never addressed. Nitpicky complaint, sure, but it’s really annoying.
And so is THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR.
Your Thoughts?