Review of The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008) by Nolan M — 08 Mar 2015

If you've a) Never seen the other Mummy films, but are aware of what they are. b) Like dumb special effects pictures with quick-cutty action (cause God knows people seem to enjoy that crap) and c) Have no high expecations for entertainment, then you'll probably like this film.

If you're smarter of course, and have seen the other two Mummy films, going to this one is a major shift. If you thought 2 was different from 1, get a hold of this one. Especially when watching all the films in a row it is much more jarring than I remember it to be. I saw this in a theatre and thought it was fairly fun and okay, so I never thought it was much good at all, but wow oh wow now that I watch it again its much more than "not good". It's AWFUL!

The change in plot to focus on Ancient China instead of Egypt wasn't too bad imo on paper. You've seen Egypt twice before, why not a another change? But the execution was poor. Everything is tonally different. The way its shot and the editing is hardly consistent with the last two pictures, favouring a lot of cuts and congested camera framing, making action set pieces that seem potentially fun and silly turn incomprehensible and joyless. Even the characters aren't as fun here. Brendan Fraser seems tired and has lost his comic touch (maybe cause he's ironically older in this film, taking places 10-15 something years after the second), and Rachel Weisz is replaced by another actress who's very distractingly different, and its just odd to see her referring to events she went through in the other films when she's not the same actress. Even the brother Jonathan is reduced to bad comic relief, and a grown up Alex played by a bland actor who's just... whatever. The film is filled with bad dialogue, bad punchlines and lines that just scream "Hey, this happened before! Remember the last two movies!?" This film falls into CG syndrome and favours a lot of CG effects that look anything but "there" in the film. The whole film now looks like a bad, dated video game.

Clearly, handing the film off to a director who's had a mediocre-bad track record was bad. If we could've just waited for Stephen Sommers, a better script, and have convinced Weisz to actually join the film with the better script (she declined this film because she disagreed with the script used), we could've had a nice return for the characters. Unfortunately, this big, dull, joyless bland return for the franchise may be the last we ever see, and its a bad way to go.

Surely it's not terrible? Maybe average, right? I'm surprised to say it really is terrible. Unwatchable? Maybe not quite, but it is painful to watch as you certainly feel heartbroken and insulted to see that a chance for a return for these likeable characters was wasted off on a poorly executed effort like this, and to know there's likely no chance in hell we'll get another attempt to do so ever again. The next you'll ever hear of it will probably be announcement of a series reboot in a few years knowing Hollywood. Fuck.