Starring: Brendan Fraser, Maria Bello, Jet Li
Directed by: Rob Cohen (“The Fast and the Furiousâ€)
Written by: Alfred Gough (“Spider-Man 2â€) and Miles Millar (“Spider-Man 2â€)
When one of the characters in the third installment of The Mummy saga declares “I’ve seen enough mummies to last a lifetime!†you can’t help but giggle at the fitting statement and wonder why execs at Universal Pictures didn’t get the memo. Mummies are the monsters in yesterday, so making room for another archeological dig is probably just the studio’s way of simply shaking every grain of sand from Brendan Fraser’s lucrative boots.
Fraser is back as tomb raider Rick O’Connell, but neither director nor leading lady returns to round out the trilogy. Instead, Stealth’s Rob Cohen replaces director Stephen Sommers and Maria Bello takes over for Rachel Weisz. In this chapter, the team, which includes Rick’s son, Alex (Luke Ford), travels to China to stop a cursed emperor (Jet Li) and his stone army from unearthining and seeking eternal life.
Like the first two unmemorable albeit money-making adventures, Emperor relies heavily on special effects to divert the audience’s attention from the film’s misplaced and scanty humor, action sequences, and dialogue. An example of all three: a yak vomiting on someone’s face, an Abominable Snowman using a human as a football to kick a field goal, and Bello’s Egyptologist character proclaiming “There’s something incredibly romantic about vanquishing the undead.†If rotting corpses and three-headed dragons don’t make your heart flutter, then file, er, bury this one, a mediocre movie only a – dare I say – mummy could love.