The Mummy Returns Review
by David N. Butterworth (dnb AT dca DOT net)November 16th, 2001
THE MUMMY RETURNS
A film review by David N. Butterworth
Copyright 2001 David N. Butterworth
** (out of ****)
"What did you expect, Gone With the Wind?" someone once wrote in response to my somewhat less-than enthusiastic review of 1999's "The Mummy," a loud, long, and surprisingly lucrative horror/adventure yarn starring Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, and a tombful of special effects. "It's the mummy. It was a good movie. It does not fall short."
Now I could have argued that just because a movie doesn’t take itself quite so seriously as, say, "Gone With the Wind," doesn’t necessarily make it a good movie. There are good mummy movies and there are bad mummy movies, after all. And then there
are movies like the afore-mentioned Fraser/Weisz outing, which falls somewhere in between. But partly intrigued by that differing of opinion from two years ago, and partly against by better judgment, I ventured cautiously into "The Mummy Returns."
"The Empire Strikes Back." "The Godfather Part II." "Aliens" (arguably). It didn’t seem likely that writer/director Stephen Sommers’s follow-up would join this acclaimed roster of films (i.e., sequels better than the originals that spawned them) and that turned out to be true. "The Mummy Returns" is actually no worse than its two-out-of-four-stars predecessor but it’s certainly no better. And in a number of ways it feels like exactly the same movie--terrific news if you enjoyed the first one, not so great if you didn’t.
In the first film, Fraser’s character was more your typical wisecracking (as opposed to whip cracking) adventurer. Here, for some reason, he tends to lay off the asides and treat the whole thing a little more seriously (a TV remake of "Gone With the Wind" might be in his future after all!). Either way, there’s only enough room in this world for one Indiana Jones, and Harrison Ford shouldn’t hang up that famous hat of his just yet.
Also in the first film, Weisz played a charmless librarian and here she plays the now charmless wife of Fraser’s Rick O’Connell. Rick and Evie have a son, Alex (played by Freddie Boath), whose sole purpose is to invigorate the proceedings with juvenile behavior and banter (not unlike "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom"’s Short Round). For instance, when catching his parents locked in an intimate embrace, Alex quips "Geez, get a room!" with that saucy British accent of his. He does this a lot, by the way.
And like the first chapter before it, this return is so laden with special effects that you exit the theater feeling positively exhausted. With no real story to speak of--some mumbo jumbo about the Scorpion King (played by WWF’s The Rock) making a pact with Anubis and forced to do battle with Imhoteop (Arnold Vosloo, reprising his mummified role)--plus characters as two-dimensional as Egyptian hieroglyphics (John Hannah is back as Evie’ scared-y cat brother Jonathan), the filmmakers had no choice but to throw everything but the kitchen sink at us courtesy the overworked CGI department.
With effects coming at us every other minute this one feels even longer than the first. Maybe with "The Mummy Returns 2" Sommers will switch gears completely and focus on the relationship between Rick and Evie.
Naah...
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David N. Butterworth
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