There’s an old movie maxim that a remake is never as good as the original; there’s another one that says a sequel is never as good as its predecessor. The Mummy Returns, the sequel to a remake, offers conclusive proof of both statements. Director Stephen Sommers’ follow-up to his surprisingly successful 1999 remake of The Mummy is so cursed with nonsensical plotting and unconvincing computer effects, and so shameless in pandering to the lowest common demographic (note the prologue cameo by WWF superstar The Rock as the hugely unnecessary Scorpion King), it has all the entertainment value of watching a slack-jawed skateboarder play a videogame for two hours.
Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz, both slightly more famous than they were in 1999, reprise their roles as fortune hunter Rick O’Connell and his librarian paramour Evelyn. Now married, the couple live in a stately manor with their young son Alex (Freddie Boath, shoehorned in just like that Vietnamese kid in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) and Evelyn’s scapegrace brother Jonathan (John Hannah). When they recover the Scorpion King’s bracelet, they become the target of a nefarious group out to resurrect Imhotep (the Mummy from the first film). Led by the reincarnation of Imhotep’s lover Anck-Su-Namun, the bad guys hope Imhotep will defeat the Scorpion King and gain control of the undead dog-headed army of Anubis, thereby allowing them to rule the world. To stop this from happening, the heroes have to brave mummy foot soldiers, jungles full of undead knife-wielding pygmies, and even a towering wall of water summoned by Imhotep to overwhelm their flying balloon-ship.
Now I know this all sounds very exciting in a Jules Verne-meets-Steven Spielberg kind of way, but the film fails even as early-summer escapism. Obviously there’s plenty of action, but not one second of it has the swashbuckling exhilaration of, say, Raiders of the Lost Ark. Between Fraser’s disinterested performance and the constant barrage of bad computer-generated effects, disbelief comes crashing down like a balloon-ship under a wall of water. As Imhotep, Arnold Vosloo has even less to do than he did in the first film, and two other charismatic actors (Oded Fehr and Oz‘s Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) are wasted entirely, presumably to leave room for even more bad CG effects. By the time The Rock’s poorly bitmapped mug shows up on an overgrown scorpion body, you’ll wish Boris Karloff’s mummified carcass would shamble out of its sarcophagus to enact a gruesome revenge on everyone involved with this idiotic mess.
(1.5/4)