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The Mummy – Tomb of the Dragon Emperor: Open with Extreme Caution

Yep, I have no idea where his front foot is either. It’s mummy magic.

Movies are almost synonymous with one type of food; popcorn. Summertime is equally synonymous with one kind of movie; popcorn cinema. This would be the type of movie where you walk in, sit down with an overly large tub of possibly-buttered delight in your lap and shut the brain off. Just watch the action, be wowed by the explosions and chuckle at the one-liners you would only joke about, but never believe you would actually hear someone say on screen. Now it may sound like I’m mocking these flicks, but I’m not at all, we eat these up with both hands every year and this summer is no different. How do you think Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull made such a ridiculous amount of money? So, tonight I bore witness to another lasting franchise in the candy coated adventure world and it’s new arrival, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.

The first two movies were helmed by franchise creator Steven Sommers, but this time the reins were handed over to another Universal Studios master-at-arms, Rob Cohen. Rob is no stranger to the multi-sequeled storyline, but usually he’s at the front of it instead of coming in during round three. He launched such franchises as The Fast and the Furious, xXx and The Skulls. He also directed one of the more stand out martial arts movies of the early 1990′s, Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story. With all those credits on his rap sheet, you’d figure this project would be akin to giving a professional conductor one of Beethoven’s classics, a walk in the park. Yet this stroll down popcorn lane proved to be a more windy road than imagined.

The story takes place many years after the last chapter and Rick and Evie’s son, Alex has taken on the family business of digging up and uncovering the most dangerous of mummified enemies. This new foe happens to be an ancient Chinese emperor who once controlled the five elements and tried to take over the world, which seems to be a bit of a habit for these mummies. Once he is reawakened, the ride begins and we are off once again, racing around the continent to try and stop him from becoming completely immortal. The basic premise works and personally I was glad to move the location out of Egypt, since I felt they had played that tune as long as they could. Yet once you move below the basic storyline, all the connecting points seem to fall apart. I’m a huge supporter in the “willing suspension of disbelief”, which we all need to fully enjoy any movie, but this suspension was pulled just a few hairs past the limit. So many things take place which are never explained, never set up and sometimes never paid off. Once the momentum really got moving, every other scene was spent trying to figure out how we got there and what was going on. It had a little taste of Wanted, which also jumped absolutely huge logic holes for the sake of making something look cool on screen, but that film, under the insane vision of Timur Bekmambetov, pulled it off much better.

As for casting, back in the day this was going to be the bread and butter of Brendan Fraser’s career (who plays our dashing hero and young Indiana Jones homage, Rick O’Connell), but since the first movie I haven’t felt that same magic from his performance. Ever since then it has all felt like a shadow or almost a parody of the moments he created in the original. Also, in the first two he starred alongside Rachel Weisz, but she didn’t return to the sand and savagery this time and the studios were forced to either write her out or replace her. They chose the latter. In comes Maria Bello as Evie O’Connell, the spunky and adventurous librarian-cum-swashbuckler. I think Maria is a fantastic actress and I was wildly supportive of her turn in A History of Violence, but this was not a good fit for her. Her action scenes felt forced and overly silly, on top of her accent sliding in, out and completely off the British continent. From the original chapters, the only person to bring the exact same level, for better or for worse, was John Hannah, as Evie’s charmingly opportunistic brother, Jonathan. New to this series was Michelle Yeoh, an immortal witch hoping to stop the Dragon Emperor, and Jet Li as the Emperor himself. Michelle was fairly strong in her performance, but Jet Li spent most of the movie walking around as an animated Terra Cotta statue, so it’s a little hard to criticize any lack of emotion from the part.

It can be argued that acting skills and story structure have nothing to do with popcorn cinema, it is all about the special effects. We are there for the glitz, the glamor and the wonderment of things we have never seen before on screen. Unfortunately this visual extravaganza didn’t break down any walls in that realm. The statue effect on Jet Li’s character skipped back and forth between impressive and amateurish, while the practical effects and explosions failed to really pop the eyes open of the audience. The one thing standing out amongst the crowd was the Yeti creatures (don’t ask how or why they appeared, just let that one go). These imagined visualizations of the abominable snowmen provided not only some much needed freshness to the flick, but some decent comedy as well. Numerous times there was laughter peeling through the audience, but half of it was laughing alongside the movie, while the rest was laughing at it. Big difference, same result: entertainment. As many problems as this does have, I can’t say I walked out unamused. The plot holes and logic issues leave the script looking like a well used target down at the local gun range, but the jokes were plentiful and they kept coming until you gave in and laughed.

Recommendation: As I’ve said before, this is an action movie, so it can only be helped by seeing it on the big screen, but on this occassion I might just suggest waiting for TV distribution and sitting really, really close to the set.

p.s. I was once again reminded about why I choose to go to the Arclight Cinemas as much as possible. Tonight they gave out posters signed by Rob Cohen to people sitting in random seat numbers. Plus, if that wasn’t enough of a bonus for the night, Rob Cohen himself was there to introduce the movie. He mentioned that he made the movie for us, the fans, the general public, and not for the critics and bloggers (like myself). He said it’s about sheer entrainment, so whether you think it’s good or it’s bad, if you laugh at it during any point, his job is done. For me the job was done, but it might not have been the job he intended.

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Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Lost Hopes

“Why does there have to be protesters at every premier?!”

Nineteen years. That’s how long we waited for this movie to come to fruition. Nineteen years. Someone born after Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade left the theater is no old enough to vote, get married and fly halfway around the world to fight for the right for this movie and many others to be made. For their sakes, I seriously hope they don’t see it. They’ll all go AWOL instantly.

Yes, I’ll get right out there and say it, I did not like the movie. In fact, I was fairly offended by time it was over. I’ve read a number of reviews that are cutting the movie a ton of slack because it’s an Indy film and we all just love him so much and we’re so glad to see him back, but there is only so much slack in the world and it must have gotten used up in the mere hours before I got to see it on opening day. I guess from now on I should keep an extra helping of slack in an airtight jar in my closet, just for these occasions. (There are spoilers from this point on, so if you still want to go in untarnished, stop here. Just know deep in your heart that I tried to stop you.)

Let’s see if I can list out just a small helping of the problems with this flick:

- The magnetism of the Crystal Skull (and other alien body parts): This little tidbit of information was brought out pretty quickly in the film as one of those cool tricks only Indy seem to know about, but for the rest of the film the magnetism became a choice of each individual scene. You could feel George Lucas think, “Should we have it attract metal here? Yeah that would be cool” or “Nah, that doesn’t seem cool here. Let’s not make it magnetic at all. Or how about we stop it’s magnetic powers with this mystical hemp cloth!! God, I’m a genius.”

- CGI – Spielberg has a well earned place in cinema history for pushing CGI to it’s limits and making it work. On the flip side, Lucas has an equally well earned place in cinema history for pushing CGI to the other end of the spectrum where he think he can just replace real actors from this point on. The quality and usage in Crystal Skull was borderline childish. The duck boat effects over the waterfalls, the unnecessary CGI in the jungle chase, the mind numbing alien ship evacuation, all of these felt like a freshman in animation school could have been impressed by his work, but not coming from Spielberg, who previously with War of the Worlds actually made me a tad skiddish going outside after the movie was over since I believed those things could be there.

- Indy’s age: Harrison Ford reportedly waited for a long time to find a script that he was happy with and took a respectful look at his age and the age of his character. This is what he agreed to? I can’t think of a fight scene where he got more beat down than in this chapter during the ant hill sequence, adding the fact that he is about twenty years older now. We needed Indy to be smarter, more clever, using that intelligence that he cultivated over a quarter of a century as a professor, but instead we get a completely ludicrous senior citizen MMA match in the dirt. Even the slightest touch of realism here would have seen Indy with a broken hip.

- Shia, the Monkey King: This almost ranks as the most disappointing part of the movie because they were just starting to win me back when Shia gets sucked up into the jungle trees. He gets wrapped up in a piar of vines that decide completely on their own to retract and pull him up into a mystical monkey kingdom, where in three agonizing seconds of screen time, Shia learns to swing through the trees like Tarzan and lead the monkeys on an all out assault against Cate Blanchett. If they had made a point earlier of saying all the monkeys in that region of the world were strict haters of Communism, maybe I could have joined in the fun, but they happen to leave that out.

- Indy vs. Nuke: Yep, why not? Let’s open this movie big since people have waited so long to see it hit the screen. What could possibly be bigger than showing Indiana Jones survive a nuclear blast in the first 20 minutes of the film? What could possibly not make sense about there being random lead lined refrigerators in a fake town? What could possibly not seem plausible about that same fridge being magically vaulted by the blast miles away, with Indy not only able to walk afterwards, but just plain able to get out of the fridge at all? Didn’t kids lock themselves in those and die all the time in the 50′s?

There are more things I could go into, but I’ll just leave you with those few bullet points. I’m all for continuing franchises and moving the story along as long as they are treated with the same intelligence and respect as the previous versions. This was not only denied the respect of a well written script, but it also managed to deny the respect of its audience. My advice now is for Spielberg to slow his downward spiral by moving as far away from George Lucas as possible, and if he likes a script from now on (as he supposedly did with the Indy version done by Frank Darabont, which Lucas vetoed), man up and shoot it. It couldn’t have been nearly as awful as what we got in the end.

Even worse is the fact that this will make a retarded amount of money, like previous crapfest Spider-Man 3, and further the studios and other directors to think making movies like this, no matter how bad, is a profitable and worthwhile venture. I’m begging someone with influence and opportunity to sit these people down, show them Once, Lars and the Real Girl, Brick, hell, make them watch the original three Indy films and see if they can’t remember what doing a good job really felt like.