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Movie Review: The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
Father, mother, and son explorers, on an adventure in Asia, unearth an emperor cursed 2,000 years ago by a sorceress
RATING: PG-13
GENRE: Fantasy action-adventure thriller
RELEASE DATE: August 1, 2008
RUNNING TIME: 113 minutes
VIOLENCE FACTOR: There is adventure, action, and violence, but nothing graphic or intense.
BAD WORDS: No
RACY? No
GRANDS:
CRITIQUE:
The first Mummy was graceless but chummy. Ditto the second. But the third Mummy is just plain crummy.
The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is a noisy, nonsensical nuisance, an Indiana Jones wannabe that could easily have been titled Raiders of the Lost Brain Cell.
It follows The Mummy of 1999 and The Mummy Returns of 2001; it makes them both look good. So if your grandkids insist on seeing this Mummy, be prepared to go and let your mind wander throughout an uninvolving couple of hours.
Brendan Fraser returns as globetrotting archaeologist and adventurer Rick O’Connell. He’s joined in this go-round by his wife Evelyn (Maria Bello replaces Rachel Weisz), his son Alex (newcomer Luke Ford), and his wife’s brother Jonathan (John Hannah).
Alex calls on his experienced parents for help after he’s tricked into awakening a ruthless Chinese emperor with supernatural powers (Jet Li). The emperor has been slumbering in suspended animation, entombed in clay along with his army of 10,000 warriors. How did he get that way? A sorceress (Michell Yeoh) put a curse on the emperor 2,000 years ago. And now a military zealot (Anthony Wong Chan-Sang) has big world-domination plans for this resurrected terra-cotta army.
The O’Connells must stop them.
It’s obvious that director Rob Cohen cherishes all computer-generated images and cares about the cartoonish special effects that he trots out in every other scene. Perhaps that’s why the narrative is preposterous, the dialogue awkward, the acting wooden, the continuity absent, and the frequent fight scenes phony.
Childish movies are one thing, empty spectacles that aspire to be video games, or theme-park rides are something else entirely.
The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is a dead movie about the undead; in a just universe, it should bury this franchise.
Where is that tomb when we really need one?
GP Rating System:
Four Grands = Bravo, don’t miss it.
Three Grands = Pretty good, short list it.
Two Grands = Just okay, don’t dismiss it.
One Grand = Yeah, we dissed it.
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