"The Mummy" misses?

I have a habit of getting excited for movies that are “not-so-great”. These aren’t necessarily bad movies, but no one really raves about them either. It happened for Mr. Bean’s Holiday, it happened for Semi-Pro and it happened for The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, the movie I’m reviewing today.

Let me first start off by saying I did not see the other two movies, The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, or the apparent spin-off, The Scorpion King. So why did I go see this movie instead of the Dark Knight, which I haven’t seen, was playing at the same time and everyone loves? Two reasons: Brendon Frasier and Jet Li. Jet Li’s name is synonymous with great kung-fu scenes, give the guy a blade and you got MAGIC! Also, he makes for a great villain. And what can I say about Brendon Frasier? The guy is a terrific actor and he’s able go to from comedy to drama in the blink of an eye since his face shows great expression. And speaking about his face and how he looks, there are two words for HOT: “Brendon” and “Frasier”. Man, the guy is so hot I could insert a quote from TDI here. I’m not gay or anything but… DAMN! *Cough, cough* Anyways…

Now, on to the movie itself. It was basically constant roller coaster, they’d follow an action sequence with nothing but dialog. Here’s what I was like during the movie: “OH MY GOD! This is awesome! Did you see what he just did? And… What are they talking about now? How is this important? God, this sucks… WHOA, I DID NOT SEE THAT COMING! Jesus, look at everything going on! This is fantastic! … And now they’re talking again. I don’t care about this! Get back to the fighting, and killing… THERE IT IS! YES AWESOME!” You’d be on the edge of your seat one minute, then lying back almost sleeping. Basically stretch that out for an hour and half and you got The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. I guess I should give a summary of the movie…

You start of in ancient China, were we learn of an evil emperor (played by Jet Li. He has a real name, but “the emperor” just sounds better, and it’s how I remember him) who basically ruled China with an iron claw. He takes everything over, trains to make sure he can keep it and learns how to control the 5 elements: fire, water, wind, earth and metal. Once he’s basically the unquestioned ruler, he realizes he can’t live forever. Naturally he tries to fix that by finding a sorceress. He finds her sexy, she but she falls in love with his general. They find the spell and the sorceress (who also has a real name, but “sorceress” sounds better) seems to cast it, but then the emperor has his general killed for sleeping with the woman he wanted and stabs the sorceress since she didn’t want to be with him. But, she has the last laugh when it turns out she actually cursed the emperor and turned him and his army into stone and buried it under the desert sands. She rides away seriously wounded. All this is presented with awesome special effects and great choreography. Then we experience the first low…

After that, the next thing we see is Rick O’Connell (Brendan Frasier and hero of The Mummy series) TRYING TO FISH… This seems really boring, until he whips out two guns and shoots wildly. That’s the high point for a little while. We learn that he and his wife are retired. His wife, Evelyn, is a successful author, having written books on their first adventures, but has a writers block and promised a third book (you see where this is going). They both have the same problem: they are BORED since they stopped going on adventures. Now, you’re probably asking yourself “if they’re retired, who finds the Mummy?”

Well, they have a son, Alex. One thing that bothers me about him is that his mother is English and his father is American, but instead speaking in either accent, the actor seems to switch back and forth. Anyways, his parents think that he’s studying, but he’s actually in the desert finding the emperors tomb. He goes in with 4 other people, three die (no one important naturally), they find the emperor and- HOLY CRAP, A NINJA COMES OUT OF NO WHERE! I am serious, NO WHERE. And it’s a SHE! Awesome, female ninja for the WIN! So Alex manages to fend her off and she just seems to just give up for no reason while they move the emperor to a museum. He celebrates by going to his uncle’s bar/club. “Coincidentally” his parents are asked to escort a priceless diamond to China and, while they’re there, they decide to visit Evelyn’s brother.

Now we enter the worst thing about the movie: Jonathan Carnahan. He’s Evelyn’s brother and Alex’s uncle. His job is to basically try to RUIN the movie by whining and being a buffoon. I guess they wanted a comic relief, but I don’t think a new character was necessary: they give Rick a few humorous lines anyways, and Brendon can deliver them much better, so why not just give him more lines and take out Jonathan? I don’t know if he was in the first movies or not, but either way they should of killed him off.

Back to the plot… You can guess what happens next: they all meet up in the club, boring family dispute (even with a fist fight) then they all somehow end up in the museum where they get double crossed by the other survivor of the tomb raid and revive the Emperor. Next is a bunch of gun slinging and the ninja (who also has a real name…) returns. After the Emperor’s revived, he goes on to TEAR CHINA A NEW ONE! This consists of a mid-city chase with a wagon pulled by demon horses and fire works truck! Even with all the fire power our heroes had, they couldn’t touch him! The only time someone came close he threw his face at them. HE THREW HIS FACE THEM! HE THREW. HIS FACE! How many movies can you say someone does that? I can guarantee you that the Joker would NOT do that. You can top that scene! Anyways, serious public damage, awesome fireworks show, lost of bullets shot and one big explosion at the end!

After our “heroes” get their ass kicked they all go back to the bar, where the ninja explains everything about the dragon emperor… which she couldn’t do back at his tomb for no reason… Maybe if she had taken to time to explain things, instead of fighting Alex without knowing if he was good or bad, this never would have happened! Anyways, a bit of whining from Jonathan and then their off to the Himalayas to stop the emperor from reaching a fountain in Shangri-La to drink the water and become immortal. To do that, he must place the diamond that brought him back on a pedestal in this temple. So many ways to stop him there: destroy the temple, destroy the pedestal, steal the diamond… but of course they decided that plan A is to just let him show up and try to kick his ass (plan B is blowing up the temple, but then the emperor would already be THERE…). He shows up and an awesome battle ensues. Now, I don’t see how they plan on beating him, they got bullets and the emperor can control the five elements, they’d need some kind of- WHOA YETIS! HOLY CRAP, THEY CAME OUT OF NO WHERE! And they are awesome! They’re throwing army guys around and destroying crap: there is NOTHING they can’t do… except shut Jonathan up. Remember when I said throwing his face couldn’t be topped? I was wrong. Yetis top face throwing any day! I am serious, these guys are awesome. Before seeing them, even after the face throwing, I was thinking “Was this really worth my 10$?” but as soon as they show up I was like “YES IT WAS!” This movie should have been called “The Mummy: The Emperor who throws his face vs. Yetis”. So they take down most of the emperor’s army (the emperor, his general and a few others are still left) then the emperor does a sonic scream and scares them away. CHEAP! So despite the yetis, it seems that the emperor is just to 1337 for them. He places the diamond, discovers the location of Shangri-La, which is a pain for everyone because it’s higher up. To make matters worse, the father gets stabbed. Well, the answer to that is easy: bring him to the oasis. So they take him there (using an avalanche to keep the emperor back, but somehow not slowing them down…) and they heal him. They all talk about how they need to keep watch for him and ambush him when he shows up… cause that’s worked out well in the past. And it’s even stupider since we learned that he can only be killed with this one, specific dagger… So, while he’s not there, guess what everyone does? That’s right, they have boring conversations! Here we learn that the woman watching the fountain is the ninja’s mother and the sorceress who was stabbed at the start of the movie, and they’re both over 2000 years old. While the mother, who was supposed to be watching the entrance at the time, and the daughter are talking, the emperor bursts in, flings them both aside, ignored the bullets shot at him and just walks in the water. How BAD ASS was that! Beyond that, he now has a shape shifting ability (again? I didn’t remember it…) and turns into a dragon to crash out of there! WHICKED!

The next thing we learn is that the emperor now needs to go back to the desert to revive his army. Once they pass the great wall, THEN he will be unstoppable. You know, it feels like playing against a bratty kid making up the rules of his own game as you go along so he wins:
“You have to pour the water on him and he’ll be back to life and rule the world.”
“Okay, I did it…”
“No wait, now you have to climb this mountain and find this water before you do!”
“Alright, did that too now…”
“Okay, now go back to where you started and-”
“God damn…”
But he goes along with all this, since he’s going to rule the world after all, and summons his army once more. These guys look awesome, they’re what you picture when you say “ancient Chinese warrior” (kind of samurai-like) and they look like they’re made of stone. To retaliate, the sorceress summons all of the emperor’s enemies that he had buried under the Great Wall of China. These guys look weak: picture a skeleton with a shovel in his hand, and a few had missing limbs. So I’m sitting there thinking “How can they stand a chance?” Then I saw some of them get hurt and keep going, literally losing their heads in some cases. So, they take a licking and keep on kicking, but still I think “Ok, but the other guys are made of stone…” At that point Rick whips out his trusty revolver and shoots a few of them. Instead of bouncing off, the warriors crumble. The emperor really cheapped out on the materials when building his army (PUN!)… Anyways, it’s WAR! So awesome things start happening: zombies kill rock dudes, guns shoot, sword fights break out, a plane flies by shooting (with Jonathan in it, I was hoping it would crash) the emperor even transforms into this giant “beast” (the only way I can describe it) and takes out a bunch of zombies. All pretty cool, but then they start talking. IN THE MIDDLE OF THE WAR! To be fair, the sorceress was stabbed after giving up her immortality to summon the army, but still I found it boring. The worst thing was that they were behind some rocks and the war could of clearly been seen just the other side! But no, we missed a lot of it because she had to die. Man, why does death have to be so inconvenient? Actually, now that I think about it, that could be the moral of the movie: the emperor wants to live forever, the sorceress and her daughter were immortal so they could help, Rick died but they brought him back, zombies helped out in the war… Death is just inconvenient.

Alright, so Rick and Alex go to fight the emperor. Two Chinese people, who were actually important to the plot but I found them boring and fairly pointless, die, but who cares? And here comes the most flawed scene in the movie: the climax. See, the emperor was pwning them all this time, then Rick yelled out “Fight fair, like a man!” and he listens! Now first off, he doesn’t speak English! Secondly, if you’re an emperor who is about to take over the world, why take that chance? So instead of an awesome fight with lots of bullets, transformation and elemental bending, we basically get playground style fight. Here’s what it would have been like if I wrote part of the ending:
Rick sneaks behind the emperor, attempting to assassinate him, but the emperor is able to hear his foot steps. He jumps up when Rick comes near then kicks him in the chest, sending him flying across the room. While still he’s still on his back, the emperor transforms into the three-headed dragon again and shoots fire. Rick quickly gets up and hides behind a pillar. The emperor looks on each side of the pillar using two heads and picks him up. Rick takes out his revolver and shoots him in the eye, causing him to step back and transform to human again. This just enrages the emperor more…
SEE? And that’s just the start; imagine if I would have written the whole thing? But nope, we get a regular fight, ending with Rick just grabbing the emperor’s fists and holding him back. I’m not going to tell you how he dies, but he does. I was disappointed, I mean just he was just so awesome earlier, but he was taken down so easily. After that the movie wraps up: Evelyn has another book to write about, Alex and the ninja hook up, and Jonathan sadly lives to tell another lame joke…

Now, while you’re reading that you might think I hate the movie overall, but that’s not true: I liked a lot of it, but I can’t describe the fights (the good parts) just in words. If I tried, it would probably just be me going “pow, bang, SHINK! RAWR!” But in all seriousness the fights are fantastic, just not enough of them compared to the talking. The movie would be a lot better if they did just ONE thing: made it longer to put more fight scenes in (or at least make the one already in longer). Also, kill Jonathan, but that might asking for too much. Anyways, time for me to give a rating to this movie. I figured out an easy way to give this movie a fair score: I’d say it was about 65% fights and 45% talking, so I give this movie a rating of 6.5 on 10 and give you the recommendation of going to see it for reason of YETI!