Mummy 3 Review

 6/10

Movie:

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008) The nice thing about Rotten Tomatoes' tomatometer is that it helps inform you... it tells you if a movie is good, and it tells you if a movie is not so good.... there's a cliched saying 'Knowledge is Power', but in the case of movies, this is true... because watching a bad movie can still be quite enjoyable... but at the same time, expecting a movie to be good but finding out its not can be very disappointing.

I try to go into all movies with muted expectations, but in the case of Mummy 3, knowing it was at 12% on the tomatometer made those expectations even more muted.... which led me to this film...

For some reason they decided to rehash this franchise for a 3rd time, I guess if Indy can do it, so can the Indy-rip-offs, right?

The film feels really frenetic and all over the place, and the dialogue is pretty flat at some points (well, almost all points)... but that doesn't mean the film is boring or too horrible to enjoy purely as a popcorn film...

This chapter in the Mummy story is set many years later and now the main characters from the previous movie have a kid and are retired form the tomb raiding biz... til the government pursuedes them to do one more job (yes, sounds a lot like Indiana Jones, doesn't it? just wait til the part where they have to pour magic immortality water over the dying father!)

In this case Brendan Fraiser and his played-by-a-not-as-attractive-or-interesting-actress wife end up going to civil war era China and end up fighting to stop the resurrected Mummy of The First Emperor of China (played by Jet Li of course), who had a curse placed on him to turn him into terracotta (see, those statues in the tomb weren't just statues, they were actually real people turned into clay (and then fired into pottery) by... MAGIC! Note that they never actually call him 'Qin Shihuangdi', I'm guessing they were afraid of pissing off some crazed Chinese internet people if they explicitly toyed with real Chinese historical figures. (but keep in mind that the Chinese government bans movies about ghosts and magic anyway...)

Aside from the dialogue and frenetic directing problems, the story's fundamental premise that Brenden Fraiser is a retired adventurer with a 20 year old kid doesn't really wash... and the replacement Racheal Weiss just doesn't work for me either.

Its nice to see Russell Wong is still getting work, but seems out of place too... Anthony Wong does a good job in his part as the Warlord general. I'm guessing there's supposed to be more back story on him and his weird scar nazi girlfriend, but it seems to have been cut. Isabella Leong was good, but her character was too 1 dimensional, and Michelle Yeoh was underused... and so, of course, was Jet... I wonder how many days he actually spent filming, since he only appears in 'human form' in a few scenes, most of the movie he's all CGed up as /Mummy Jet/... :-P

All that said the action and visual effects were relatively decent and entertaining... sets were not bad too (i think thats the same Old Shanghai street they used in Blood Brothers and probably 50 other movies).

Etchy's Verdict: Sit back, relax, don't think too hard and don't mind the Yetis... if you can to that, you should enjoy it. I'll give it a 6.000/10, as marginal a 'fresh' as I can. :-P