May 3–10, 2001

movies

Bringing Out the Dead

The Mummy Returns exhumes a horde of musty plot points.

by Cindy Fuchs

The Mummy Returns

Directed by Stephen Sommers
A Universal release

Be not a Fraser: A fearless Brendan in The Mummy Returns.

Stephen Sommers’ movie deserves credit for truth in advertising — the Mummy does indeed return, in all his ILM glory. Imhotep first comes roaring on screen as the craggy, moth-eaten-looking fellow he was in The Mummy, bandages hanging off his not-quite-existent limbs in gruesome tatters, teeth glaringly visible through the holes in his skull. Eventually, as in the first film, Imhotep comes into his full bodily form (played by Arnold Vosloo), again roaring in ancient Arabic, again looking to revive his 3,000-year-old lover Anck-Su-Namun (Sandra Bernhard’s ex, Patricia Velasquez), and again pestered by adventurer/do-gooder Rick O’Connell (Brendan Fraser) and his sidekicks — wife Evie (Rachel Weisz), her brother Jonathan (John Hannah) and desert sage Ardeth Bay (Oded Fehr).

As this brief rundown suggests, The Mummy Returns is all about rehashing and repeating. Just about everyone’s back for a second go, including writer-director Sommers, producers, cinematographer, editor and designers, even a few characters who died in the first film. But then, that’s what mummies do, isn’t it? Resurrect.

The impulse to repeat is understandable, given the unexpected success of the first film, a punchy old-school Hollywood B-movie dressed up as action-comedy. It stood Boris Karloff on his head and animated the musty old mummy-stuck-in-a-pyramid story with witty F/X and smarty-pants dialogue, not to mention Brendan Fraser’s all-around agreeable mug. Arriving in theaters with relatively little fanfare, it made an unexpectedly whopping profit ($414 million worldwide), and became an insta-franchise.

Regrettably, the sequel takes the safest route, delivering more of the same, and lots of it. Everything in The Mummy Returns is bigger, from its impressively enormous matte shots and massive armies composed of thousands of digitized soldiers, to its great swirling sand effects and outsized characters. The armies are larger, the fight scenes longer, the digitized stunts more complicated, and the mighty mummy face that materialized in the first film’s desert sand here appears in rushing floodwaters. Locations range from the Moroccan desert to London’s Tower Bridge, which means lots of traveling, limited in 1933 to horses, trucks, trains and a dirigible, piloted by Rick’s entrepreneurial buddy Izzy (Shaun Parkes), prescient proprietor of Magic Carpet Airways. Rick and Evie’s romantic teasing is now solidified into an 8-year marriage, and their ardor is apparently boundless: Every time they catch a minute, they’re smooching, much to the embarrassment of their young son, Alex (Freddie Boath).

Lamentably, the film’s biggest effect — the loudly publicized feature debut of WWF wrestler The Rock (Dwayne Johnson) — is also the biggest disappointment. As the spectacularly doomed Scorpion King, The Rock is typically charismatic and beautiful to behold, but he’s only on screen for a few minutes, right at the beginning, and he doesn’t talk as much as he roars and grunts (which is too bad, considering his verbal talents, exploited so well by Vince McMahon). In the few minutes of pre-story set up, you see that the Scorpion King is an ancient warrior who sells his soul for an army of two-legged doggy-beasts. He wins a horrific and costly war, then gets sucked away by the demon and stowed in a pyramid, to be dug up much later in the film.

That would be the film’s present day, 1933, which happens to be the dreaded Year of the Scorpion. On their way to the Scorpion King’s 5,000-year-old resting place, the humans battle each other, the weather, and a battalion of Ewok-ish mummy-pygmies, sputtering and swooping all through the jungle-like oasis. Unfortunately, when the SK is dug up, he’s an unwieldy combination of digital Rock’s face and digital Scorpion body: Fraser and Vosloo do their best to make you believe they’re in an ancient chamber with this bad boy, but he’s too obviously other-dimensional to be convincing.

Of the human organisms, the most welcome and least developed is Lock Nah (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Oz’s recently deceased and sorely missed Adebisi), assigned by Imhotep to babysit the kidnapped Alex. His sparring with the child, however, is less comic than tedious (large black man vs. precocious white child), and is only one of the film’s schematically antagonistic pairings, designed to situate everyone in his or her own combat scene in the jumbled climax. Rick and Imhotep square off (they also endure a three-way with the SK), as do Ardeth Bay’s vast army and the doggy-creatures, and Evie and Anck-Su-Namun. Telegraphed throughout the film via Evie’s troubling visions (apparently, she’s got Nefertiti’s ancient spirit in her), the ladies’ eventual showdown reveals that they have rudimentary command of ancient Japanese martial arts (how this translates to ancient Egyptian fighting techniques, I’m not quite sure) and that their most important function is saving their men’s asses.