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Friday, August 1, 2008
The Mummy: Tomb of the Lousy Adventure
The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor had me on the edge of my seat - as I slumped farther and farther down in my chair, realizing that I was seeing the lousiest action movie of the summer.
The worst thing about that realization was, it set in before the film was 10 minutes old. As a sneer began to cross my lips, a friend leaned over and asked me, “Are you getting the same sinking feeling I am?” The fact that my posterior was almost on the floor pretty much answered the question.
For this third go-round, the adventuring, bickering O’Connell family (Brendan Fraser, Maria Bello and Luke Ford) must stop an evil Chinese emperor (Jet Li) who has risen from the dead, intending to awaken his army and rule the world. Mwah-ho-hum. If only the story were as amusing as some of the digital effects.
Mind you, I didn’t go into the new Mummy movie expecting Dark Knight-level brilliance. I liked the first Mummy in this series. At the very least, I was hoping for a couple of hours of fun escapism that, indeed, would escape from my memory almost immediately. Instead, I found myself consumed with a compulsion to lead director Rob Cohen into a pit of quicksand.
Cohen, a hack of diminishing returns, has made exactly one good movie: Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story. The other films I’ve seen of his have been mediocre at best and abysmal at worst. Dragonheart went up in smoke. The Fast and the Furious was neither. XXX struck out. And Stealth was aptly named for the way it flew under the radar at the box office.
Cohen’s action sequences here make no sense, not so much because of fast editing, but because he does such a terrible job of laying out who goes where. When he repeatedly failed to provide an establishing shot that showed where anyone or anything was, all I could do was shake my head in confusion. One of Cohen’s greatest sins was to take a fight between Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh, two of the best physical actors in the world, and shoot it mostly in slow-motion close-ups.
I kept wishing better talent were behind the camera, and not even A-list talent like Spielberg or Cameron. I would have preferred Brett Ratner (the Rush Hour movies), Paul W.S. Anderson (Mortal Kombat) or Chuck Russell (The Scorpion King). None of them are great directors, but all of them can direct action far better than Cohen.
Having expected so little and gotten even less from Cohen, I was hoping the cast would breathe some life into the movie. Alas, no. Fraser still has a goofy charm, but it gets lost amid all the noise. Bello, playing the Rachel Weisz character, is badly miscast. She’s an excellent actress in movies like A History of Violence and The Cooler, but goofy action comedy isn’t her gift, nor is a British accent. Ford, playing the son, looks so immature that I’d swear that the O’Connells had him when they were 10. Yeoh, playing the emperor’s ancient nemesis, enlivens the movie somewhat, but neither she nor Jet Li are used nearly as well as they should have been.
And the less said about the lame attempts at comedy the better. I’ll just type the words “yak vomit” and let you figure out the rest - if you dare.
GRADE: D-
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