It is easy to knock The Mummy Returns as a despicable piece of cinematic pastiche and a ham-handed attempt to cash in on a good thing. Well, in almost every way, that is exactly what it is. But it is also so crammed with a storyteller's delight and youthful high spirits that it is difficult not to smile indulgently at its antics and admit at the end of it all, perhaps a little shamefacedly, that it really was rather fun. Stephen Sommers, in going for the sequel, has cast subtlety to the wind. He intends this feature to be bigger, louder and more sumptuous than The Mummy, and he goes about this with terrifying abandon, careless of such niceties as structural or narrative coherence. And God forbid if you missed the first installment, for although some effort is made to provide a little background, this is done in such a haphazard fashion as to make almost no impact on our emotional response to the film -- if one was ever required.
Fraser and Weisz are back as the intrepid Rick O'Connell and Evie, who since the first installment, has become his wife. They also have a son (Freddie Boath), who oozes insufferable Home Alone precariousness, but by some miracle manages to avoid being totally nauseating. The family, as ever, are on an archaeological dig and discover the bracelet of the Scorpion King, which unbeknownst to them, will release the devastating armies of Anubis. To get the rest of the cast from The Mummy involved, a new group of expendable baddies are brought on to resurrect -- again -- the high priest Imhotep, "who is the only guy tough enough to take on the Scorpion King." Why this death match is desired is never really made very clear, but you are asked to sit back and enjoy the action without worrying too much about the whys and wherefores of the situation. And on the whole, with the action paced as it is, you don't really have much time to wonder.
Sommers does not believe in wasting any time, and even before the opening credits are quite over, he seems to be halfway through an involved story about the Scorpion King and the lost army of Anubis. This is where Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson -- veteran of WWF Smackdown -- gets to do his highly publicized US$5 million five-second slot of scowling at the camera. He returns at the end of the film in an animatronic version -- straight out of Mortal Kombat -- which manages the scowls just as effectively, so that you wonder why they bothered with The Rock at all. It is hardly surprising, now that the studios know that they can sell anything given sufficient hype, that a film called The Scorpion King is in production and slated for release next year.
And speaking of rip-offs, The Mummy Returns is absolutely full of them -- so much so that watching it can easily be turned into a game of guess-the-movie. From predictable sources such as Indiana Jones all the way to Starship Troopers, Star Wars -- The Phantom Menace, and even a scene that looks like it got lost from Steven Spielberg's appalling Peter Pan movie Hook.
Sommers seems unwilling to leave his hands off any successful adventure film, drawing indiscriminately on cinematic gimmicks and some of the worst dialogue that Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz have yet had to deal with. But they manage to be sufficiently tongue in cheek not to make themselves ridiculous -- but unfortunately also undermine even the most basic sympathetic reaction to their characters. Sommers' attempt to go for the heartstrings falls flat every time he tries it. Unfortunately, for having created a husband and wife adventure team, there was potential to bring in a new emotional maturity into the well-worn adventure genre.
RSS