Movie Review: The Mummy - Dead and Should be Buried

“It is a shame when mediocre movies happen to good actors.”

That was my thought when I left the theater on Friday after seeing “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor”. God bless Brendan Frasier and Maria Bello (replacing Rachel Weisz in the series) for trying though – with better material, I think they could actually be a good duo.

Sadly, they decided to sign up for the 3rd installment (technically 4th movie if you count Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s “Scorpion King”) and the end product is quite beneath their talent.

Jet Li plays the evil mummy this time around – he is an evil warlord resurrected in mid 20th century and hell bent on world domination. Enter Frasier, Bello, their son Alex, played by Luke Ford and Michelle Yeoh who leads the band of fighters across half of Asia trying to stop Li.


It’s funny – while I was watching the movie I was reasonably entertained watching the movie’s plot unfold but it was only after I went home and thought back on the movie that I felt how truly bad it was especially after a somewhat ok trailer:




So many elements of the movie were tired – bad CGI Yeti, horrifically wordy and unfunny script, bad accents (especially Ford’s natural Australian accent came annoyingly in and out). The action/fighting sequences were actually fairly good but there just weren’t enough of them to balance out the rest of the movie’s dead height.

The unevenness of the movie should be not be a surprised because the director Rob Cohen’s filmography is a see-saw of good movies (“XXX,” “Fast and the Furious”) and horrifically bad dreck (2005’s “Stealth” for which I saw AND paid full price – I’ve been mad at Cohen ever since!).

Here’s the bottom-line: people fight, there are guns and things go “boom” in this movie. If you don’t mind a swiss-cheese plot and a clunky plot, get out of the heat and go see “The Mummy.” You won’t necessarily hate yourself after seeing it but you might deserve a time out after wasting your own time.