The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is a follow up to Brendan Fraser’s 1999 remake of the 1932 Boris Karloff classic and his subsequent 2001 sequel The Mummy Returns. Again Fraser is Rick O'Connell, now a retired gentleman in post war Oxfordshire sharing his country estate with his wife Evelyn (no longer Rachel Weitz but now Maria Bello who uses her excess leisure time to oversell a British accent). The secret service comes calling on the bored adventurers to entrust them with one final sortie – repatriate a precious artefact to China. While in Shanghai they drop into the nightclub of Evelyn’s shady, entrepreneurial buffoon brother John (reprised again by Jonathan Carnahan). They’re shocked to find their twentysomething son Alex (now Luke Ford) truant from school to lead an archaeological dig which has unearthed a terra cotta army. This turns out to be the cursed remains of the 2000 year old megalomaniac Emperor Han played by Jet Li (who PROMISED he wasn’t going to make any more action films). The package that Rick and Evelyn were tricked into returning is the key to bringing the Emperor back to life and giving him immortality. To avoid this the plot twists get cumbersome and involve Shangri-La, abominable snowmen, Lin (newcomer Isabella Leong), a beautiful and immortal ninja along with the witch Zi Juan (Michelle Yeoh) Lin’s equally ancient and equally hot mother (yes of course we see mommy take on the Mummy!) This franchise is getting gauze thin with characters that are actually bandage free but with a band-aid adhered plot. Examples of creative anaemia abound but perhaps most pointedly when Lin cheats death by saying “he missed!’ she could be speaking for the whole film.