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This Film On

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The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

(2008)

112 min. Universal Pictures Distribution. Director: Rob Cohen. Cast: Brendan Fraser, Jet Li, Maria Bello, Michelle Yeoh, John Hannah.

So the Emperor responsible for at least one iteration of the Great Wall of China learns from mystics mastery over the elements, see? And then he asks a witch to invoke a secret spell of immortality, but she double-crosses him with a curse. Centuries later, in 1946 England, treasure hunters are called out of retirement to hand-deliver the Eye of Shangri-La to China, but in the process they awaken the Emperor. All involved want to use the Eye of Shangri-La to point the way to the Himalaya-hidden "Pool of Eternal Life." While you're in the area, why not check out the Golden Tower and the fabled land of Shangri-La? I'm tired just describing the plot of The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. I bet you're tired, and you haven't even watched it. If you know what's good for you, keep it that way.

Writer-director Stephen Sommers (The Mummy, The Mummy Returns) has stepped into the emeritus role of producer, leaving this sequel's writing duties to Alfred Gough & Miles Millar (Smallville, Shanghai Noon) and the directing job to Rob Cohen (The Fast and the Furious). The results are a lame screenplay and an empty, effects-driven exercise. Okay, the first two films in this franchise were empty, effects-driven exercises, too, but at least they had the courage of their convictions and therefore entertained. This conventional late-summer action picture is all joyless spectacle: it has a certain epic sweep (especially in its location lensing), but it also has tacky CGI Yeti. So, y'know, it's not David Lean.

In the pro column, as adventurer Rick O'Connell, Brendan Fraser doesn’t skip a beat from the earlier Mummy movies—he’s just as goofy, energetic and convincing in the action scenes. And the Emperor's terra-cotta army is pretty cool. That's about it. Everything else is a con, in more ways than one. Rachel Weisz has wisely jumped ship, leaving a miscast Maria Bello gamely to plunge ahead in the role of Rick's wife Evy (though John Hannah returns as Evie's brother Jonathan) . In an obvious grasp at extending the franchise, this sequel skips to 1946 to age the O'Connell's son Alex (once Freddie Boath, now Luke Ford) to leading-man age.

Worst of all, the filmmakers take the franchise's cultural subtext—its obvious angling for reflected glow from the Indiana Jones films—and make it insultingly explicit: a stunt from Raiders of the Lost Ark here, a major plot point from The Last Crusade there, and a handful of the memorable setpieces from Temple of Doom: a Shanghai nightclub that expodes into action, a harrowing airplane ride over snowy crags, and the usual tour of rope bridges and booby-trapped tombs. (In an odd acknowledgement of creative bankruptcy, we also learn that Evie has written novels called The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, before hitting a writer's block that only a new adventure can solve.)

The presence of Jet Li (as the Emperor) and Michelle Yeoh (as the good witch of the East), both wasted, serves both to prove that this film means business and that it hopes to coast on the goodwill of the cast and the franchise. There's also a seemingly studio-mandated stock romance between Alex and Yeoh's ninja partner (Isabella Leong) and enough pallid one-liners to build the Great Wall of Bad Dialogue: "Why do I always have to save the day?" "Look, kid, I've put down more mummies in my time than you." "I hate it when the kid's right." "I hate mummies! They never play fair!" "Mad Dog can outfly a three-headed lizard any day of the week!" In the midst of Cohen's noisy action sequences, the lines only serve to enhance the consistently careless ridiculousness of what we're watching. Instead of giving us our adrenaline fix, The Mummy: The Tomb of the Dragon Emperor numbs us with a placebo.