Mummy, Mummy, Mummy ... don't forget

The word “mummy” is said so frequently in the new Mummy movie it’s as if we have to be reminded what franchise we’re watching.

I hardly blame the writers, though: Mummies are most frequently Egyptian, wrapped in ancient toilet paper and entombed in gold sarcophagi. This mummy is Chinese and is buried in his dungarees inside a terracotta pot. Oh and he does kung fu, which may be a first among mummies. So yeah, we need to be reminded that this is a mummy movie by peppering every third syllable of dialogue with the word “mummy” — “I hate mummies,” “Mummies never play fair.” “I beat the same mummy … twice!” or “Sorry pal, there’s a mummy on the loose.”

The film is set in 1940s China, where young archeologist Alex (Luke Ford) is making his bones on a 2,000-year-old mummy excavation. Ignoring long-standing mummy curses, Alex unearths Emperor Han (Jet Li) and carts him off for show-and-tell. No word on how he gets the mummy’s elaborate shrine — a large clay carriage with four full-size clay horses — out of the tomb, or even across a vast desert of dunes, onto an airplane and then into a museum in a large city. Mummy freighters … maybe that can be the subject of the next movie.

Like the first two Mummy films, mummy sympathizers conspire to awaken the very stiff corpse, and like the other movies they’re successful to a certain degree. Once the mummy is awake and throwing his weight around inside a skin of breakable clay, Alex has to call on mummy and daddy to save the day. Alex of course is an O’Connell and his parents are Rick and Evelyn O’Connell, the famed tomb desecrators and mummy destroyers. Mummy-slayer Rick is again played by Brendan Fraser in a performance I would call wooden and flat if it weren’t a tremendous insult to all things wooden and flat. Mummy slayer’s wife, Evelyn, once played by Rachel Weisz, is now played by a very plucky Maria Bello (A History of Violence), who flubs a British accent like only a great actress in a horrible movie can.

If you’ve seen the other two Mummy movies — the first one was spectacular in a campy-fun way; the second was a sharp decline — then Tomb of the Dragon Emperor will feel like a rerun, but with worse computer animation. Here’s the formula: Mummy comes alive, mummy has super powers, mummy awakens his bad-mummy army, good guys awaken their good-mummy army, mummies fight. This one goes in at least one new, albeit ridiculous, direction when abominable snowmen are summoned from the snow to fight the mummy, which may provide another Mummy spin-off a la Scorpion King — Mummy-Fighting Yeti would be the title.

Like the other two films, there are an inordinate number of mummy rules, secret spells, hidden mummy chambers, rejuvenating potions and even a gold knife, the only weapon that can defeat a Chinese mummy. I have my own rule I can apply to these mummies: if a movie has more rules than a game of Monopoly then it’s a poorly written movie.

Mummy 3, filmed in China using some breathtaking scenery, wanders from China’s high deserts to snowy peaks and then back to the desert, where the mummy’s curse originated. The mummy has super powers over the elements (yet only uses fire and ice) and can morph into a three-headed dragon and giant troll, but much of the fighting involves either guns or kung fu. By the time kung fu artists Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh, who have never fought on a film before, do their mummy martial arts the movie has already fallen apart.

Great pains are made to pass the mummy legacy onto Rick’s son, but newcomer Ford never seems adequate as a mummy killer. Rick, although skilled at reburying mummies, is an old and awkward fighter and Fraser’s acting is atrocious to no end. Michelle Yeoh and a character played by Isabella Leong are interesting only because they add some grace and beauty to an otherwise stupid and clunky mummy movie. John Hannah, who plays Evelyn’s brother, returns as a sleazy mummy profiteer and he has the movie’s worst line: “You guy’s are like mummy magnets.”

If you’ve paid attention, or maybe just started feeling annoyed for no reason at all, then you might have noticed I used the word “mummy” in every sentence of this review including the next one. The wrappings have finally come off the Mummy franchise.

***This review originally ran in the West Valley View 2008.***