Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
8/2/08
So, how long do you want
your favorite franchise to continue? Past the departure of the filmmakers?
The stars? The supporting cast? Anyone even remotely involved
with the original? Do you want to meet adult children of the heroes
who hadn't even been born in the original? Some would rather never
see ANY sequels, while others would go to see anything that slaps a number
(or, the current fashion, a subtitle) behind the title of the movie they
once loved. Somewhere between those two extremes lies the fan base
that will embrace The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.
Gone are many of the characters (Imhotep, Ardeth Bay, Anck Su Namun)
from Stephen Sommers' two Mummy films, the original actors who played
Evie (Rachel Weisz) and Alex O'Connell (Freddie Boath), Sommers himself
(although the credits list him as a Producer) and the Egyptian setting.
In their place, we get an interesting infusion of Chinese mythology, a
few cool new characters, one great piece of recasting and one awful one,
and a less effective outing behind the camera by Rob Cohen. Tomb
is a fun summer movie, but it's a shadow of the series high point, 2001's
The
Mummy Returns.
First, a flashback to 50
BC: the ruthless Emperor Han (Jet Li) conquers most of Asia, but
decides that he has “too much to accomplish for one lifetime”. To
that end, he dispatches his most trusted General (Russell Wong) on a mission
to find the secret of eternal life. With the help of Priestess Zi
Juan (Michelle Yeoh), he does so, and the two of them fall in love.
But once she's read the ancient incantation, the hateful Han has General
Ming drawn and quartered and stabs her because she would not become his
queen. Zi Juan has the last laugh: it wasn't eternal life she
gave the Emperor, but rather a curse on he and his army that turns them
into clay terra cotta statues. Cut to 1947, when an archaeological
dig in China has unearthed the ancient statues and ships the Emperor's
off to Shanghai. There, the dig's leader, an adult Alex O'Connell
(Luke Ford) runs into his parents, Rick (Brendan Fraser) and Evie (Maria
Bello), who've been bored out of their minds in retirement and jumped at
a request to deliver an artifact to the museum there. Turns out it
was all a plan by a delusional General (Anthony Won Chau-Sang) to revive
the Dragon Emperor. It works, and the fire-breathing clay Mummy starts
blazing a path of destruction to the secret location of Shangri La in hopes
of gaining the power to raise his entire army and Rule the World.
Aided by Alex's mysterious girlfriend (Isabella Leong), the immortal Zi
Juan, old pal Jonathan (John Hannah) and some Abominable Snowmen, the O'Connells
are back in the mummy-busting business.
The Mummy Returns
was a prototype Summer Movie, filled with daring heroes, sky-high stakes,
fiendish villains with just a dusting of sympathy, impossible escapes and
preposterous but electrifying action sequences. I wasn't so high
on its' predecessor, which certainly had some laughs but not enough momentum
to distract from its' illogic. Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
falls somewhere in between: in many ways, it's a China-based remake
of Returns, and it can't help but suffer by comparison. But
even if it doesn't resurrect a dying O'Connell or pit one supernatural
army against another as well as the previous Mummy, it does those
things and more well enough to keep the plates spinning. Fraser is
back in fine form as Rick O'Connell, his most iconic movie role.
He's the rare actor who really feels at home in the adventure genre, and
he throws a punch and a quip with equal bravado. They're really different
actresses, but Bello proves the perfect choice to replace Weisz, making
Evie her own with her special brand of grown-up sexuality but recapturing
the balance between butt-kicking and bookish Englishness that made the
character special (all the more impressive since she's from right here
in Pennsylvania). She and Fraser have a formidable chemistry and
really sell us not only the love between their characters but the boredom
that's come to fill an existence that can never measure up to mummy hunting
on a day to day basis. Hannah knows he's here for comic relief and
throws all characterization to the wind and gives us a Jonathan who's kinda
crazed by his third go-round with the Mummy Menace. His scenes with
a yak to whom he becomes unduly attached are hilarious.
The Chinese setting provides
some extra juice for the same old paces, and Li makes a great villain,
as always. One interesting change of pace for Evil Jet is to see
him as an authority figure, and he oozes arrogant menace whenever he's
on screen. I wasn't as happy with the motion capture FX version of
the character, who didn't offer nearly as much visual variety and wasn't
as convincing as all the various mummified versions of Arnold Vosloo's
Imhotep in the earlier movies. But as somebody who's always frustrated
with the deferential treatment afforded evil Emperors in Chinese movies
like Hero and Curse of the
Golden Flower, I was pretty happy to see this kind of character get
what he had coming to him. Yeoh is one of Hollywood's most under-employed
actresses, and brings her usual dignity and bearing to Zi Juan, plus she
and Li get to have a swordfight (her battle with Zhang Ziyi in Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Dragon is probably the greatest swordfight in movie history).
Wong is terrific both in the flashback sequences and as a motion capture
corpse late in the game.
But not all of Emperor's
recasting is successful. The Alex O'Connell role has been reimagined
in some really awkward ways (nothing ingratiates us to a character like
having him irrationally hate the people we paid to see), and Ford does
not play it well, coming off as a parody of a 40's movie tough guy.
His relationship with Leong's Lin is worse than a non-starter: it's
in the spark-free league of the Affleck-Tyler romance in Armageddon.
And Cohen doesn't step effectively into Sommers' shoes, bringing his usual
frantic action style (quick cuts, lots of close-ups) into a genre that
really needs a smoother look to follow what's going on. I particularly
struggled to keep up with the carriage chase when Han first escapes the
museum. Writers Alfred Gough & Miles Millar take the Rick/Evie
relationship in interesting directions, but their struggles with their
son are somewhere between contrived and rote and their plot is largely
just an inferior restaging of the earlier movie. Not sure it needed
the Abominable Snowmen, either.
The Mummy: Tomb
of the Dragon Emperor should please fans of the franchise and repel
all others. It's fast and fun and is actually the most logically
coherent of the Rick O'Connell adventures. But it's also a series
showing its' age, and if, as the final scene suggests, there's a rumble
with a Peruvian Mummy in the O'Connells future, it could use a little more
inspiration and a little less imitation. And it might want to leave
the action to the grown-ups. Hard to imagine even the most devout
of Mummy die-hards ever wanting to see an O'Connell other than Rick
put down those pesky undead. |
