THE MUMMY RETURNS Not staying dead is what makes them mummies Jeez, how old am I getting? Seems like an hour and a half ago when The Mummy was still in theaters. Two years sure can zip by pretty quickly. That's two years, our time. Ten years have passed in narrative time, though, and Rick O'Connell (Brendan Fraser) and his wife Evie (Rachel Wiesz), having failed to learn their lesson, are still plundering Egyptian tombs. Now they have a precocious son (argh, a precocious son!) played by Freddie Boath, who I'm sure seemed very funny on paper. But before that, we're told the tale of the Scorpion King (pro wrestler Dwayne "The Rock" Johnston), who tried to lay siege to the ancient Egyptian city of...uh, I forget its name. But he's driven back (probably because his battle tactics more closely resemble pro wrestling than anything you'd actually use a sword for), and dying of thirst in the desert, made a pact with Anubis, the Egyptian god of the dead. The Scorpion King gets to lead Anubis's jackal-headed army over the city walls, but in return, Anubis gets his soul for all eternity, or something. Already, we've got problems, the equating of Anubis with a Judeo-Christian Satan; Anubis may be the god of the dead with the head of a jackal, but he's not some sort of ill-tempered demon, he's actually fairly well-regarded, and as far as Egyptian deities go, not such a bad guy. Anyway, back up to the present, where Rick suddenly has an elaborate tattoo on his right wrist, which I've heard was conveniently covered by a wristband throughout the first film, but I'm smellin' bullshit here, all the more because we find it makes him some sort of prophesied Chosen One (aaarrrggghhh!). At least an amusing exchange between him and a returning Oded Fehr later in the film about it is good for a chuckle. Rick finds the Scorpion King's bracelet (nothing says macho like a bracelet) and finds himself and his family pursued by a gang of thugs who believe that the Scorpion King is due for a resurrection, and they want to bring back Imhotep (the mummy from the first film, played again by Arnold Vosloo, at least when he's not being played by a rotting CGI carcass) to fight him, possibly in a steel cage match, so that they can keep the army for themselves and, needless to say, conquer the world. There's all sorts of wacky stuff here about people making decisions based on their past lives from Imhotep's day, though I'm having a tough time swallowing Wiesz as an Egyptian. Actually, I hate this past-life shit; like prophecy, psychic links, and all sorts of other shit I hate, it's only here to make people advance the plot by acting in ways that normal people don't act. Two kidnappings, an oasis-dwelling tribe of blowgun-wielding CGI pygmies, two Braveheart-sized field battles (one of which has zero casualties on the human side!), one escape through a toilet (don't ask), TWO scenes where Rick outruns (or outflies) a wall of water (and the second time has this big pause, so it feels like it happens yet again), and one more where he outruns the sunrise, which happens so slowly one can only conclude that the planet on which The Mummy Returns takes place rotates once every six years. The biggest reason I liked The Mummy was that now that we've reached a point where another Indiana Jones movie is never, ever going to happen (keep dreaming), a big-budget, first-class ripoff didn't sound like such a bad idea. The Mummy Returns (to the trough) lacks that movie's out-of-left-field "freshness"; at least The Mummy was recycling a series that didn't have any entries in the past ten years. I guess the cast is fine, Wiesz wearing WAY too much eye makeup, something that drives me wild in reasonable amounts, but this is the eye-makeup equivalent of a sixty-six-double-G. Fraser is a good comic actor but needs to work on his action-hero stuff. I liked Patricia Velazquez as the boo-hiss lover of Imhotep, her haircut long having been Hollywood shorthand for "domineering bitch". And Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (who plays Anabisi in the most delightfully trashy show of all time, Oz) is a hoot as the gang's chief thug; you know that this movie isn't going to let him chop off the kid's arm (hope as we might), but at least we believe that he WANTS to. His exchange with the kid on the train is hilarious. If there's one thing I did like about this movie (and make no mistake, there's no way I'm recommending it overall), it's the refreshing, unselfconscious way it lets the women in on the swashbuckling action. Warrior-women have become commonplace enough to almost become a cliché (which is kinda sad, since we'd never call "warrior men" a cliché, would we?), but most movies are so obvious and forced about it, as if they were screaming in your year "LOOK! THIS WOMAN IS AS TOUGH AS ANY MAN!!!" The Mummy Returns makes no such pretense, and one almost forgets that we haven't seen this kind of likably relaxed portrayal of women as action heroes since The Phantom. There are other fun things here, many of them just recycled from the first film, like the scarab beetles which burrow into your flesh and burst out your head, and the return of the always-charismatic Fehr who's singlehandedly guaranteed to improve Arab-American relations (well, at least female Americans; this guy's a hunk and a half). I liked Velazquez's make-out session with a mouldering carcass, and I liked the flashbacks to ancient Egypt the best, but it doesn't really add up to much of a movie, more like a series of fast-paced and expensive but insignificant episodes. And this is the only movie I can think of where the greedy guy actually gets to keep his treasure at the end of the movie. But I don't think there's a single moment when any of our heroes seem to be in the slightest danger; much of the action is played for slapstick and the pandering to the pro-wrestling crowd is painfully evident in the introductory battle scene, which plays less like a life-or-death siege than a thousands-strong Battle Royale (I can't believe I remember this stuff). And how is it that mummies can smash through stone walls, but they're blasted apart by shotguns? The Scorpion King doesn't return until the end of the film when he turns up as a big giant "climax monster", which isn't really him, it's all CGI. The design of the monster is pretty cool, and for the most part it's rendered fairly well (maybe I'm getting more jaded since the first film), but I think deciding to render his face was a mistake; they should've found a way to use the real one. No matter how bad that would've turned out, it would've turned out better than this. I've heard that his inclusion in the movie was mostly to determine if there's much of a market for a starring role for him, since pro wrestlers have generally not had much luck on the big screen. Considering this movie's take, it looks like a Scorpion King movie is a foregone conclusion. Ironically, this movie makes it impossible to tell if Johnston is a good or charismatic enough actor to carry a movie, since in the few minutes of screen time he gets, all of his (three?) lines are delivered in another language. Such are the wacky workings of Hollywood. At least The Mummy Returns is written and directed by Stephen Sommers, not falling into the common trap of a sequel becoming largely a made-by-committee project with a new MTV grad director and a script by sixty-five people. It still only exists because sequels to movies as successful as The Mummy are inevitable (I can't imagine Sommers in 1998 saying "I'm making a movie called The Mummy, but what I REALLY want to do is tell the story of the Scorpion King!"), but at least it's still, for the most part, one man's (money-motivated) vision. It's a waste of time, for sure, but not an unenjoyable one. If anything, it actually makes me look forward to the inevitable Scorpion King movie, since I can only assume that it's going to tread on this movie's most successful ground. I just hope that The Rock can act. And fight like he means it. BACK TO THE M's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE