the mummy: tomb of the dragon emperor (rob cohen, 2008)

It’s been a pretty good summer blockbuster season. Even without the towering achievement of The Dark Knight, we’ve had some truly great films (WALL-E), some very very good ones (Hellboy II: The Golden Army), and some less-great but still thoroughly enjoyable offerings (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Iron Man). All of which makes the crushing mediocrity of The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor even harder to excuse.

Now, The Mummy (Stephen Sommers, 1999) was pretty damn far from what you would call good cinema, but, call it a guilty pleasure if you must, it was good, trashy fun – melding two delightfully old-fashioned genres (the B-movie horror film and the adventure serial), with modern CG spectacle. The Mummy Returns (2001) kinda sucked overall, but it had its moments, and in its better sequences it retained the energy and wit of its predecessor. The law of diminishing returns, however, is in full swing here: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is a near-worthless conveyor-belt product, joylessly going through the motions of the series and hoping a change of scenery (China instead of Egypt) will disguise the onset of rigor mortis.

There is nothing interesting, inventive or entertaining about this film, and in no part does it work well. The action takes far too long to get started, and instead, for the first half-hour or so, we’re regaled with a re-introduction to the protagonists, Rick and Evelyn O’Connell (the latter now played by Maria Bello – generally a talented and dependable actress, but here seeming bored throughout). These early scenes are played for broad comedy, but, as with all the numerous attempts at humour in the film, this falls flat. Every trite and unfunny one-liner is lingered over with nudge-wink emphasis, and none succeeds in raising as much as an amused half-smile. Also disappointing is the lack of the chemistry and witty interplay between Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz  – every scene Fraser and Bello share feels lifeless and forced, making the early scenes focusing on their relationship a chore to sit through.

Once the action finally starts, however, you start to wish it hadn’t. Rob Cohen (of The Fast and the Furious and XXX fame) directs these scenes with his trademark uninspired rapid-cutting and shaky camerawork. It’s impossible to figure out exactly what is going on, and impossible to care, because none of the numerous action sequences that make up the whole of the film’s second half offer anything interesting or memorable. More damningly, there’s never the slightest sense of peril or real danger – the lazy plotting means that, again and again, at the moment when the situation threatens to get out of hands, the O’Connells are miraculously saved by some nick-of-time deus ex machina – an ancient magical weapon no-one bothered to mention before, some sub-clause in the unwieldily complicated web of spells surrounding the undead emperor, etcetera. Most jarringly, the good guys are rescued from a battle in the Himalayas that is starting to look hopeless by a gang of Yetis that suddenly show up out of nowhere to do the rescuing and then, just as suddenly, disappear. This happens not once, but twice in the space of five minutes, after which the fluffy protectors go back to wherever the hell they came from and are never spoken of again. This sort of anything-goes plotting is the worst trap a fantasy-tinged narrative can fall into, and it’s inexcusable.

The sheer lack of ideas and facile plotting make themselves most evident when the film resorts to simply lifting scenes from earlier (better) movies. One of the central set-pieces, a brawl in a Shanghai nightclub and a subsequent car chase through the brightly-lit streets of the city, doesn’t even try to hide its plagiarism of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (Steven Spielberg, 1984) – to follow it up with a flight to the Himalayas in a rickety, livestock-laden cargo plane is just insulting.

Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. then, is neither funny, nor thrilling, nor entertaining in the slightest. It’s rarely painful to watch – it’s at least competent – but it is terminally boring, fatally uninteresting and completely forgettable. If anything, it puts Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull into focus – while it was inevitably a disappointment in the light of its unimpeachable predecessors, it had character, ideas and a film-making verve that Tomb of the Dragon Emperor cannot even dream of. Digging up the Mummy franchise a third time was clearly inadvisable – this corpse has started to rot. Perhaps it’s time to lay it to rest for good.