There’s no question that The Mummy Returns gives you plenty of bang for your buck. It would be impossible to accuse the filmmakers of stinting on spectacle or action. They give you a really big show for your eight-fifty (or whatever). This Mummy sequel is most definitely a worthy escape-from-the-heat, into-the-air-conditioned-comfort, of-your-multiplex summer movie. And it’s about one hundred times more entertaining than its only current Hollywood “action” competition, Driven, which compared to The Mummy Returns plays like a tedious Ingmar Bergman chamber piece, sans the good acting. (If you look to your local repertory house, though, you can find some pretty nifty action right now courtesy of the Hong Kong releases Once Upon a Time in China I and II, and Time and Tide . . . .)
So what’s the problem? Well, if you actually never saw the first Mummy (I mean the first Brendan Fraser one, not the classic Boris Karloff original) there pretty much isn’t one. While The Mummy Returns’ plot will be basically incomprehensible to you, you’ll be too busy enjoying what’s going on to care much. However, if you’re like me, and not only saw The Mummy but enjoyed it immensely and remember it fairly well, you might not have nearly as good a time. Why? Because this new one is, sadly, much of the time less a sequel than an expensive, uninspired remake. The one adjective that most aptly describes The Mummy Returns is “samey.” (Not to be confused with the popular supplement SAMe, and not, I realize, strictly a word, but still . . . .)
Don’t get me wrong. There are far worse things for a movie to be than like the first Mummy (again, see Driven -- or, better yet, don’t). And it’s definitely fun to “check in with old friends,” as it were, and catch up with what Rick (Fraser), Evelyn (Rachel Weisz), and her brother Jonathan (John Hannah) are up to – awww, Rick and Evy are married! with a spunky kid! (Freddie Boath). And Jonathan’s a spendthrift playboy who makes time with blonde bombshells. Ardeth Bay (Oded Fehr) is back too, along with good old Imhotep himself (Arnold Vosloo); the former presumably has spent the intervening years between the first and second installments riding around in the desert, and the latter in eternal damnation, so there’s not as much to report about their activities.
And there is some cool new stuff, [WARNING – FROM HERE ON, MINOR SPOILERS] with an ancient martial arts competition between the Pharoah’s daughter and his concubine standing out (you’ve seen at the beginning of the trailer). There’s also a nifty airship, and for a very welcome change, a shift in location for awhile far from the sands of the Egyptian desert – all the way to England. These London sequences were a great idea, and are quite exciting. Writer/director Stephen Sommers really should have done more with them, though. Having mummies climbing on walls in London streets like Spiderman on speed and attacking a red double decker bus is a lot of fun; really disappointingly, though, the mummies don’t have any encounters with the general populace; pretty much nobody notices them other than the O’Connells and company. The movie’s crying out to have Imhotep and his gang on the loose in good old London town; oh well, maybe in Part III.
There’s also some uncool new stuff. There’s a pretty dumb sequence supposedly set “in the jungles of the Nile” – I’m quoting from the press material. It looks like about 12,000 potted plants set out on carpet. Here we meet a new type of monster. I won’t give it away by saying what, but it will say that it’s very disappointing when they turn out to be more of comic relief than terrifying, especially given the buildup to their appearance, which is spooky. Fog, wind, someone crying out in apprehension, “Something’s coming!” It’s a real letdown when you see what that something is. Unlucky victims start vanishing into the vegetation, a LOT like the velociraptors in the tall grass scene in The Lost World. Unfortunately, there isn’t a mummy raptor in sight. This is one of the ways in which The Mummy Returns suffers in comparison to its predecessor. I mentioned The Mummy to someone the other day, and his first comment was, “That movie was scary!” And it was. This one never really is.
Finally, The Mummy Returns adds “spectacle” to the original mix, in the form of big battle sequences, most notably with an army of undead jackal warriors, looking a lot like Dobermans walking on their hind legs. (Again, you’ve seen these guys in the commercials). But they looked just too CGI to me, and thus not scary.
“Wait!” you’re saying. “What about the Rock as the Scorpion King?” Well, I’m afraid I have to tell you that for all intents and purposes, the Rock isn’t in this movie. He appears onscreen for probably a total of three minutes, all in the prologue, in which he doesn’t have a single line of dialogue. Towards the end of the movie, his character makes an appearance again, but it’s actually done totally with CGI (and looks it).
This brings up the issue of the special effects. Without them, there would no movie at all. And while they’re often imaginative, and usually more than adequate, they also almost always look distractingly like special effects. A major exception is the movement of the mummies, especially the title Mummy – they are a HUGE leap forward from the mummies and Mummy of the first movie. Whereas in the original, Imhotep in his decomposed form -- even though he was CGI -- still looked like a Ray Harryhausen stop-motion character with jerky movements, here “he” looks REAL. “He” interacts totally convincingly with the other actors, at one point even lifting Patricia Velasquez’ hair, as if instead of being animated by a computer somehow they got an emaciated mime to play a walking desiccated corpse.
There is one truly sublime moment courtesy of special effects, early on in a scene with The Rock. A single black scorpion emerges from the sand, like a black tear being secreted by the desert. What’s great about it is that it doesn’t look like a special effect at all, and it manages to chill, and make the audience quietly, delightedly shudder.
And this is what The Mummy Returns will mostly fail to do for anyone who can recall The Mummy. For the most part, it’s a retread without finesse. We have the SAME EXACT bubbling fountain of sand which turns out to be a swarm of flesh-eating scarabs. In the original, Evy was kidnapped by the Mummy and his followers and Rick had to pursue them to a lost city by flying across the desert in order to save her life. This time around, Rick and Evy’s son is kidnapped by the Mummy and his followers and our intrepid couple have to pursue them to a lost city by flying across the desert in order to save his life. Both films feature a climactic moment where bumbling brother Jonathan has to save his companions from imminent doom by reading out loud from a sacred book; in both, he can’t remember the hieroglyphic represented by a stork and has to shout at someone who’s busy trying to stay alive to help him out. Perhaps Sommers meant this carbon copy scene to be a funny reminder (although Jonathan doesn’t seem to recall he’s been in this same exact situation before), but really all I could think is you’d imagine after last time this particular word would have been burned into Jonathan’s brain!
In the original, as Rick, John, and Ardeth made their in a plane across the desert Imhotep tried to stop them by creating a giant wall of sand with which he chased them, his face looming huge from within it, his mouth opened to swallow them. Here, as the trio plus Evy make their way through the air Imhotep again tries to stop them by creating a giant wall of – well, it’s not sand – with which he chases them, his face looming huge from within it, his mouth open to swallow them. The first time around, it was a brilliant, terrifying image. Now, while it’s on a grander scale, it merely seems familiar. Also, the sand incarnation was short – just long enough. This time it goes on and on.
As does the whole of The Mummy Returns. It drags, because scenes do go on far too long. The original moved with a breakneck pace, only slowing down to build suspense for a gruesome shock soon to come. Sommers’ pacing is all off here; it’s as if because he was spending so much more money he wanted to make extended use out of what he bought. But bigger and longer most emphatically does not mean better. Drawing things out sometimes just negates excitement. For example, if you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen the great bit where Evy is barricading a door; Brendan grabs her saying, “Honey, watcha doin’? These guys don’t use doors,” and they run. Crash! Soldier mummies burst right through the brick wall on either side of the door. It’s briliant – it’s hysterical at the same time as it makes you jump.
However, that’s NOT how the scene is in the actual movie. The trailer edited it cleverly. Between Fraser’s line and the mummies’ entrance, a lot of stuff happens. The joke is lost, and the thrill.
The very first sequence of the main part of the movie (after the Scorpion King prologue) is alarmingly slow in going anywhere. Moments into the film, and the audience’s attention is already beginning to wane. It’s really noticeable compared to the wonderfully breathless speed with which The Mummy unwrapped (weak pun intended).
The Mummy Returns doesn’t lack, luckily, for engaging performances. The real standouts are Hannah, and Velasquez, who plays the dual roles of Anck-Su-Namun, the Pharoah’s concubine and Imhotep’s lover, as she did in the first film, and Meela, her modern day descendant/reincarnation. As Meela, Velasquez is a gleeful villain, the kind who loves being bad. Meela isn’t alone, either. She’s joined by a wonderfully charismatic sword-wielding henchman played with a lot of fun by Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje. Hannah admirably shoulders much of the film’s comedy with perfect delivery and timing. He also brings good rapport to the seeming relationship of equals Jonathan has with his eight-year-old nephew.
While young Freddie Boath is fine as Alex, he’s saddled with some extraordinarily anachronistic dialogue. Yes, this is a movie about the walking dead, so carping about realism may seem absurd, but, really, if you’re going to set your movie in the 1930’s it’s just ridiculous to have an eight-year old upper class English boy spouting lines like “Get a room!”
One of the biggest pleasures for me about The Mummy was Rachel Weisz’ performance as Evelyn. She proved herself to be a deft comedienne, making Evy a loveable, spunky clutz. Sadly, though, and its not Weisz’ fault at all but rather that of Sommers as screenwriter, in the sequel Evy’s clutziness seems to have been forgotten about. It makes her less of an interesting character, and us all the more grateful for all of Hannah’s screentime as Jonathan. Now she’s just more of a tool to advance the plot.
One area in which The Mummy Returns improves over its predecessor is its score, a rousing, grandly old-fashioned work by Alan Silvestri. It’s thoroughly derivative – listen carefully and you’ll hear echoes of a dozen other movies – but also very effective.
One final criticism – right after renewing their aquaintance, Ardeth Bay notices a tattoo, which turns out to be highly significant, that Rick O’Connell has supposedly had since childhood. One wonders how Ardeth – and everybody else, including the audience—managed to miss this marking during the first movie, since it’s ON HIS HAND! You’d think if Sommers felt a tattoo was such an important revelation, he’d have placed it on some other part of Brendan for Ardeth to discover. Then again, considering how very UN-George-of-the-Jungle-like Fraser’s body is looking here, perhaps not.
