The Mummy Returns

Of course there are snakes in “The Mummy Returns.” Snakes and carnivorous beetles, beheadings and dismembered corpses, stabbings, shootings, explosions, scantily clad women engaged in mortal combat, and giant pillars that topple into one another like dominoes. All of this, of course, in the name of good, clean family fun. If you can remember the plot of the 1999’s “The Mummy” (one of many incarnations, of course), congratulations. I can’t. I do recall that it had something to do with an Indiana Jones wannabe named Rick who must battle a fearsome Mummy called Imhotep. This post-modern Mummy now sports super powers, and has about as much in common with the linen wrapped classic of old as a Stealth Bomber has with a Piper Cub. The last movie, though fun to look at, featured an inane script, a lamebrained plot, and the cardboard characterizations that movies of this ilk so often feature. I am here to report that “The Mummy Returns” achieves exactly the same things. Bigger, faster, and without doubt louder (deafening, in fact), “The Mummy Returns” is set several years after the first movie. Rick and Evie O’Connell (Fraser and Weitsz, reprising their roles from the last picture, along with most of the principals), are now married, with a young son.

And yet, they are still trotting the globe, looking for artifacts and the undead. Evie, in particular, has an adventurous streak. She charges through the desert, dressed in clothes that look like they came out of a Bedouin Victoria’s Secret catalog. Weitsz has popped up in several movies of late, and though game, she really doesn’t have much screen presence, nor is there a lot of evidence that she can act, either. Rick is played by the ever agreeable Brendan Fraser, who manages to carry off his part hunk, part buffoon role with a fair degree of aplomb. I like Fraser, but I wonder how long he will be able to maintain this act once the boyish charm is gone. Writer-director Sommers is back as well, and he has amped his script up as much as humanly possible. Sommers has developed an approach to directing which might be dubbed the “three ring” style. Not satisfied with one action sequence, he likes to stage two or even three simultaneously, cutting back and forth in a head spinning exercise guaranteed not to exceed the attention span of even the most jaded adolescent boy. He couples the action with a plot that is probably more complicated than the movie can tolerate.

It seems that someone wants to revive Imhotep so that he can defeat an ancient warrior called the Scorpion King, take over the Scorpion King’s army, and rule the world. The Scorpion King, apparently, is even meaner and more vicious than Imhotep. Meanwhile, our plucky heroes struggle to defeat both Imhotep and the Scorpion King. All of this has the peculiar effect of making Imhotep almost heroic, and I have to say that Vosloo does achieve a certain dignity in the role. I half expected Imhotep and the O’Connell’s to team up afterwards and maybe open a cafe. I was in a receptive mood when I went to see this movie. I was ready to be wowed. And for fifteen minutes or so the movie delivered, with the relatively compelling backstory of the Scorpion King.

But before long the old ennui began to settle in. The movie goes on too long, and Sommers starts throwing elements in just for the sake of the special effects. Once these effects lose context within the story, “The Mummy Returns” is reduced to a CGI demo reel. The characters are only marginally more interesting than last time out, and the dialogue remains quippy and sparse, as if written to fit inside a comic strip word bubble. But that’s really the point, isn’t it? “The Mummy Returns” is, like the last Mummy movie, no more than a live action comic strip, designed for maximum visual impact with minimum viewer effort, and striving for a style that plays well in China or Pakistan or anywhere else in this far-flung globalized world that Hollywood blockbusters are shipped. It is hard to criticize Sommers or any of his skilled technical crew for this, but it does render the picture more or less critic-proof. Moviegoers looking for two hours of mindless popcorn level entertainment will see the picture no matter what anybody says, and I suppose they could do worse. (5/12/2001) Top