"The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor" - spoiler movie review

I can't for the life of me remember if I've seen the first Mummy movie. I know I didn't see it when it came out theatrically, so I would have had to watch it on DVD or something. I did very much enjoy the second Mummy movie, and when I saw the trailer for the third Mummy movie, and the trailer looked good, especially since Jet Li was in it, it was a go.

In general, I did enjoy the movie, but I didn't enjoy it as much as I had hoped/expected, so I was disappointed that I didn't like it more. While it didn't quite reach the level of "Independence Day", this movie definitely seemed to borrow liberally from many other movies, or maybe they just had so many of the same occurrences that it just kept reminding me of other movies. I think I'd put this just slightly higher than what I thought of "Hellboy II", but I think that's mostly because Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh were in this one, and I at least had some history with this film whereas I didn't with "Hellboy".

The film starts with a history lesson about how the Dragon Emperor of China was on a quest to take over the world, Brain's own plan notwithstanding. He has a fierce army, but there is one thing he cannot fight - death. He seeks the key to immortality and sends General Ming, his most trusted loyal friend (and yes, at the point when the narrator said this, I knew said friend was going to do something the Emperor didn't like), with a woman (Zi Juan) that the Emperor has claimed for himself to find the key. I thought Ming was going to steal the secret of eternal life, not the woman. When they come back with what they were seeking, the Emperor has Zi Juan cast the immortality spell on him, but right after that, he reveals that he knows about the liaison between Ming and her and has him killed. He tries to kill her too, but he then discovers that she had instead cursed him. (OK, so I didn't pick up on the whole "she cast a spell in a language he didn't know" major hint.) She cursed him so that he and his entire army were turned to stone.

After that great opening, we then see that Rick and Evelyn O'Connell have settled into the boringest life possible and that there's definitely now a disconnect between them. It's almost like Evelyn is a totally different woman. Conveniently, their son Alex (who is inexplicably an adult but mom and dad don't seem to have aged proportionately - guess he went away to soap opera summer camp) is involved in a dig that discovers the Dragon Emperor, and car chases and things blowing up ensue as they race to prevent him from regaining his full strength and re-awakening his army to finish his conquering of the world.

Sounds exciting, huh? Yeah, but it didn't quite play out as that exciting. There were too many wink/wink/nod/nod references to their previous adventures, even with Evelyn remembering things that happened to her that she wasn't around for. I think it also had the problem that many of the good lines were already in the trailer, and I was sick of seeing the trailer by the time I saw the movie, so when those same lines appeared in the film itself, they fell flat for me because I'd already heard them over and over again, out of context.

The father/son estrangement story was really weak, with everything all bad at the beginning, and then both father and son have these major revelations, and they have their "moment". NuEvelyn shows that she's going to be the mother-in-law from hell when we see her smothering her grown son and immediately bad mouthing and being suspicious of the woman he's interested in.

It was nice that Ming was in the final battle (and it was funny that he was missing an arm), but the scene where he gets a glimpse of his daughter before he turns to dust was a little predictable. And Zi Juan must have gotten her fertility from soap operas as well, getting pregnant from just the one tryst.

When they were in Jonathan's club in China, my first thought was, "Oh, that place used to be called Club Obi Wan". There was actually quite a bit of the movie that reminded me of various Indiana Jones movies, like when Alex was descending into the tomb with the booby traps and such, and it wasn't just because they're both action genre films about digging up old dead things and such. Liked the nifty original stunt with being dragged under the car. And then at the end when the Emperor died and all the warriors just collapsed, I completely thought of the battle droids in "Star Wars".

When Rick is stabbed, and it's determined that the only way to save him is to get to the fountain of immortality, I immediately thought of the third Indiana Jones movie and the more recent "The Forbidden Kingdom".

The Yeti were ... interesting, and certainly not run-of-the-mill. I would have liked some kind of even minor explanation of why they even saved Zi Juan when she was close to death, but it was fun to watch the Yeti fight the bad guys and then save the good guys from the avalanche. It was also funny when they realized that the daughter spoke Yeti!

I also would have liked some kind of explanation as to why crossing the Great Wall would make the warriors indestructible.

One scene I really loved was during the big battle scene near the end of the film. The warriors let loose with this massive archery attack that looks absolutely devastating. And it would have been - if they had been fighting flesh. It was funny to just watch the skeletons standing there with arrows through their rib cages and bones, and they just picked them out and then proceeded to battle. That take was a very nice gem.

OK, here's one complaint I often have with mixed-language films. Zi Yuan and her daughter have been talking to each other in Chinese the whole time. In their last scene together, all of a sudden, they're speaking English. The daughter sees her mother, and screams it out in English? And mom decides to convey a vital bit of information in English to her daughter all of a sudden? The husband said that maybe that was just a liberty so they didn't have to translate anymore, which didn't make a lot of sense to me anyway since they'd subtitled the entire rest of the film. But on top of that, I didn't get the impression that Evelyn spoke Chinese, and she obviously understood Zi Juan's dying words since she was the one to relay them to Rick and Alex. It would have worked fine for the daughter to be so consumed with grief that she can't act, but when they ask what her mother said, she just tells them, and off they go. Easy.

As you'd expect, they did have some awesome special effects. I especially love all the transformation stuff with the Emperor (and when he was oozing mud and fire, separately), and him turning into a three-headed dragon was cool too.

I really liked Brendan Fraser in the last Mummy film, but I didn't really feel he had much to do in this film. Mug a bit, try to fail at being a father, be not nearly as interesting a would-be father as Indiana Jones.

I really did not care for Maria Bello as Evelyn, and it's not even that I'm particularly tied to that character, but I don't remember Evelyn being as snarky and bitchy, in a bad way, like this Evelyn turned out to be. I really couldn't see what was in her that made Rick continue to love her all these years. I get that if Rachel Weisz didn't want to do this film, their hands were kind of tied. I guess they didn't want to kill off the character, though I think that might have been a better choice. However, Jack Ryan's wife was re-cast (heck, *Jack Ryan* was re-cast), and that didn't present a problem, so I think it was just that the character was either written wrong, she played it wrong, or the director had her play it wrong.

I really liked Jet Li in this film. He was playing ancient Chinese, which he's really good at, and the fight scenes were awesome. As much as I wish him mainstream U.S. success, I do have a hard time when he's struggling with English dialogue, and I do think it also affects his performance.

The stand-out performance in the film for me, though, was Michelle Yeoh. I generally like her anyway, but I thought she was absolutely terrific, whether it was her character standing strong against the Emperor (and we got a Jet Li/Michelle Yeoh fight scene!), or being a tender mother to her daughter (I loved the look on her face when she immediately recognized the connection between her daughter and Alex), or just doing what needed to be done the rest of the time.

John Hannah was fine as Evelyn's brother, Russell Wong was good as General Ming, and the actor playing the Emperor's new general was good as well, but other than that, it was pretty non-descript. I didn't care too much for the actors who played Alex or Ming's/Zi Juan's daughter, and I found their love story to be laughable and awkward.

I had one moment that I'm sure the filmmakers didn't intend and that I doubt anyone else experienced. The line that the Emperor's men were "terracotta warriors" seemed to have stayed with me, because during the battle scene between them and the undead skeletons, every time one of the warriors was defeated, I just pictured the foley guys in their recording studio smashing pots left and right. Very distracting.

Oh, and I also had another moment, when they were talking about being in the Himalayas and then the Yeti, and I so wanted to ride Expedition Everest. Not that my mind kept wandering from what was going on in the movie.

I don't regret having seen this movie, but I think it's time to let the franchise rest. No more adventures, in Peru or otherwise.