The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor Movie Reviews - should have been put to the grave

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor Movie Reviews - should have been put to the grave

Time to Mummify 'The Mummy'

By Todd McCarthy, Variety.com

Given the must, dust and rust emanating from this third installment, it's clear the time has come for this "Mummy" franchise to be truly mummified once and for all. Set in a post-WWII context and giving the hero a cocky college-age son in a way that tiresomely mirrors the recent "Indiana Jones" revival, the new entry has a fresh marketing angle in the Chinese setting that will boost business, especially in Asia, beyond the built-in worldwide audience that paid more than $800 million to see the first two Brendan Fraser starrers. But as the film comes off as both old hat and low-grade, this will stand as an interesting test of whether seven years represent too long a wait to sustain public interest in a once-popular concept.

Aside from some of the visual effects, which at their best involve 10,000 Terracotta warriors coming to life after 2,000 years, this is cheeseball stuff all the way. As they say, it starts with the script, and this one, by "Shanghai Noon" and "Smallville" scribes Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, should have been found wanting early on, especially in the woeful family-issues dialogue that periodically brings the otherwise lumbering adventure tale to a complete halt.

Last seen battling the Rock's Scorpion King in Egypt circa 1933, Fraser's Rick O'Connell, having helped lick the Nazis, is reintroduced here in 1946, getting used to domesticity in a sumptuous English mansion while his wife Evelyn (Maria Bello, stepping into the role vacated by Rachel Weisz) looks for inspiration for another entry in her potboiler "Mummy" novel series. Rick insists he's retired from archeology and exploring, but perhaps he doth protest too much, as it takes little convincing to get him and Evelyn to decamp for Shanghai, where they quickly encounter Evelyn's nightclubbing brother (John Hannah, returning) and their devil-may-care son Alex (Luke Ford).

Alex has inherited his parents' heedless sense of derring-do and good luck, as he has recently stumbled upon the long-sought tomb of the Dragon Emperor and the chambers housing his massive army, all preserved under the Chinese desert. An action-powered prologue reveals how, back in 50 B.C., the ruthless, nation-unifying Emperor (Jet Li) betrayed a witch (Michelle Yeoh) who had agreed to endow him with immortality, and who repaid him by sending him into an unending state of limbo between life and death.

With the help of a duplicitous contempo general (of unspecified political affiliation in 1946 China), who hopes to ride the legendary emperor's coattails to power, the crusty-looking old monarch heads to Shanghai and then to Shangri-La itself -- all the while doing battle, in various human and inhuman forms, with the O'Connell mob, which grows to include the witch, a foxy mystery woman (Isabella Leong), and an old coot pilot to spirit the gang into the Himalayas.

All the elements are present: a rare elixir, a secret stone, the toxic seductions of old Shanghai, a villain who can only be killed in one special way, the brash and sometimes bumbling Americans, the mummy who seethes with centuries of resentment and can morph into other creatures. But reheating the ingredients can't disguise how stale they are, as setpiece after setpiece strains to whip up excitement, only to fall flat while reminding of previous sequences that did such things ever so much better.

Although he's pulled off adrenaline-fueled features before, notably "The Fast and the Furious," director Rob Cohen flubs his opportunities here by shooting most of the action in medium closeups and cutting with manic arbitrariness. The coverage provides scant sense of geography or proximity between characters, while offering no excitement or suspense in the bargain. By any nominal standard for staging screen action, it's incoherent more often than not.

Rather too relaxed in the early going, Fraser only intermittently finds his old groove, as he's forced to share the spotlight with an overabundance of co-stars; as the lynchpin of the franchise, he should have exercised a measure of droit de seigneur by demanding a rewrite giving him more action and better lines. The very contempo-seeming Bello is an odd fit here, adopting a high-toned Brit accent and well out of her comfort zone when asked to lurch into battle. Ford, as Alex, is generally annoying, and only further performances by the Aussie newcomer will tell whether the blame lies with the actor or the role.

The Asian actors are highly confined by costumes and character conception, with Yeoh having the most opportunities as the fortune-dealing witch. Li only really appears in recognizably human form at the beginning and end, as the Emperor takes partially mummified CG form through most of the picture.

Production values are massive, ranging from a large Shanghai-streets soundstage set to, more impressively, the sandy wastes that serve as the setting for the climactic battle. End credits are truly endless, listing everything down to hair department interpreter.

If there is to be a fourth "Mummy," perish the thought, internal indications are that it would be set in Peru.

The Mummy should've stayed buried

This Mummy should have stayed in his crypt., 1 July 2008

Author: kimgrear from East Longmeadow,MA

I was able to catch this movie at a test screening in California while i was on vacation and its not much of a film. Its the same story as the previous ones and most of the stuff in the movie were taken from them as well. I love Brendan Fraser but he didn't look happy to be there and with how the story was set up, you can't blame him for looking miserable. He has no chemistry with Maria Bello, who was just awful (She's no Rachel Weisz, that's for damn sure.) and he has even less chemistry with his own son played by Luke Ford, who has the charisma and the charm of a brick, not to mention the fact that he looks just as old as both Fraser and Bello. Fraser has more chemistry with John Hannah, who is a welcome distraction from the lousiness of the film. The movie itself is just a flat headed mess of bad visual effects with no soul. Jet Li lacks the menacing presence of Arnold Vosloo from the previous films but that problem is more than less on the shoulders of the director, who was in my opinion more concern with the style of the film than any substance it could have had and because of that, Jet Li and most of the cast got the short end of the stick and it shows.

They should have ended it with the second film but instead, we have a movie that manages to make even "The Scorpion King" look as good as Iron Man.


Terrible..., 20 July 2008

Author: AJ_is_Awesomness from United Kingdom

A true honest review? Some true honest advice? Don't waste your time on this, its terrible.

I am a true fan of the original. I like the way it was weaved together with interesting characters, hammy dialogue and breath taking action sequences not to mention a beautiful location and some great plot devices. Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weiz lit up the screen with his charisma and her likability factor. They made a good screen presence and carried the story along until its fantastic action packed finale. I also like the way the producers mixed up the scenes, to spoon out not only violent and eerie scenes involving the main villain himself but to water it down to family standards with John Hannah's comical brother. It was a film of epic proportions. A fun story, likable characters and good use of live action and cgi, for the most part. Then about 2 years later Universal ran out of idea's and so decided to return to the bandwagon to churn out another cash cow sequel. 'The Mummy Returns' was released and whilst not as good as the original at least had the decency to be spectacular enough for the risibility. Fraser and Weiz returned (having made an offspring) and warbled, walloped and crashed through the bustling busy streets in a less than original screenplay but at least maintained their charm and kept the spark glowing from the first film. It was a likable sequel, and whilst no where near as good as its ancestor still managed to be entertaining.

So here we are folks. 2008 and yet again we are re-visiting a tired series. The next gruesome threesome to bring home to Hollywood is not only the worst of the Mummy films, but quite possibly the worst sequel of the year to date. Its so bad in fact that even Rachel Weiz turned it down, but its not surprising having listened to some of the laughably dire dialogue churned out here. I bet she took one look at the script and threw it in the trash can. The story goes something like this... Brendan Fraser (back as Rick O'Connell) his wife Maria Bello (yes they replaced her with someone with half as much talent) her brother John Hannah (what is he doing in this?)and their son Luke Ford (who has now aged by about 20 years) are somehow prancing around in their ordinary lives (in the Far East?) but suddenly the son awakens an evil Mummy Emperor (because hey thats what your bound to do in a movie like this) who wants to use his army of the undead to take over the world and get revenge on the sorceress who put him to sleep so many years ago. The only people who can stop him are the O'Connels who crash and bang through armies of stone beasts, supernatural winds and all sorts of other unoriginal menaces. Of course the showdown at the end will result in global domination or ultimate Savior. But by that time, you just wont care.

So.. why do I hate this one? when when one of the main stars from the original backs down and bails out and when the other looks bored throughout the whole darn thing you know you have a problem on your hands. And its sad because Brendan Fraser makes it blatantly obvious how unhappy he is reprising the role without Weiz by his side. He is never able to connect with Bello who tries to be chirpy but comes off looking rather ridiculous as the smart girl. And there we have another problem. Bello just cannot squeeze into Weiz's cleverly filled shoes. Its embarrassing to watch her warble on and you can really tell she felt uncomfortable trying to live up to the characters standards. The same can be said for Luke Ford, who makes a very unconvincing action hero-sidekick next to Fraser. Again they have no spark or connection what so ever. It feels like a cheap decision casting Ford because he never really brings any emotion, good or bad to the screen. The exception here is Jet Li, who whilst is not as menacing as Arnold Vosloo (the original mummy) still pulls off a good dark role. Its fresh seeing him portraying an evil character and it pays off when he is actually on screen. However his presence is short lived and at times feels like a guest appearance. And of course John Hannah who never disappoints and steals the show altogether with his one liners and witty charm. He almost makes this passable. Almost.

The movie deserves another good kick in, this time for its overly used CGI action sequences which feel cheap, tacky and unoriginal. Imagine a Roger Corman flick added into a Uwe Boll video game adaptation and your halfway there. The sets are nice to look at, but the CGI is really distracting and you can tell they did things all by computers. The character development is replaced with an endless array of pointless battle sequences. Pointless !

Its also really degrading seeing our much loved characters from the first movies spout lines of almost ridicule. Brendan Fraser cringes as he reads his lines (is he auditioning for the high school play?)and like I said Bello looks uncomfortable. Even Hannah looks bored and whilst trying to rescue this epic failure always looks like he wants to be doing better things. Like the ironing for example.

There is just so much to bash this movie about. Its an obvious cash in, but even fails at being entertaining. It doesn't live up to the first or even the second. It is boring, confusing and the characters are bland. The action is over the top and don't get me started on the screenplay. Its just an all round failure and should be buried in the Tomb of the title, never to be re-awakened.

Top 10 Robot Films of all time

t By Kathleen Murphy
Special to MSN Movies

Who doesn't want to play god? Maybe that's why the perils and pleasures of creating machines in our own image fuel so many sci-fi movie plotlines.

It's only human to dream of worry-free maid service and garbage collection, ambulatory weapons and ultrasmart computers, lover-'bots and supertoys -- a Stepford underclass obedient to our every whim and directive. And who wouldn't want to live forever, replacing worn-out organic parts with bionic spares, eventually downloading our memories into a brand-new and improved android body?

Too bad our machine-made paradise almost always short circuits. Electric sheep suddenly and inexplicably upgrade, growing human emotions and dreams of their own. What's more scary than android Adams and Eves who outstrip their creators in smarts, muscle, morals, even the capacity to love?

In "Westworld," "Star Wars," "The Terminator," "Hardware," "Eve of Destruction," "I, Robot," and "Transformers," malevolent Mechas attack humankind, out of simple revenge or the desire to be No. 1. Even Dr. Strangelove's bionic hand can't be trusted -- and beware of Kubrick's HAL, that paragon of artificial intelligence turned stone-cold killer in "2001"!

What do we do with machines that suddenly grow souls? How do we define human, if 'bots and 'droids perfectly mirror us? Think back to the Tin Man in "The Wizard of Oz," questing for a heart, or Data of "Star Trek: The Next Generation," nicknamed Pinocchio for his passionate wish to become "real."

Big Philosophical Questions aside, the movies teem with just plain lovable robots like Huey, Dewey and Louie ("Silent Running"), C-3PO and R2-D2 ("Star Wars"), and Robby the Robot ("Forbidden Planet"). And now Disney/Pixar powers up "WALL-E" (Waste Allocation Load Lifter, Earth-Class), the last, ultra-lonely robot stuck on Earth, after humans fled centuries ago. This animated adventure promises to warm the cockles of every heart -- or motherboard! To welcome "WALL-E," we activate 10 of his cinematic kin.

10. "Short Circuit" (1986)
A laser-armed robot gets juiced by a couple of big-time electrical surges during a thunderstorm, and upgrades to something like "human" on the spot. Number Five sports a kind of projector head with binocular eyes, a "torso" that rises out of a base propelled along by tank treads -- actually he looks a lot like WALL-E, the robot star of Disney's new animation. With his nasal computer voice, improbable chassis, and affection for John Wayne and the Three Stooges, this little machine is designed to charm -- and he totally upstages the rest of the (human) cast. Accidentally squashing a grasshopper, Number Five jacks into the possibility of his own death when he's told the bug can't be "reassembled." Nice moment comes when creator (Steve Guttenberg) and creation meet on a moonlit mountaintop to debate Number Five's status -- machine or something more -- and it all comes down to a robot cracking up at an old joke about a priest, a rabbi, a minister, and God.

9. "Making Mr. Right" (1987)
Red-haired kook Frankie Stone (Ann Magnuson) hires on to do PR for a corporation that's just produced Ulysses (a very funny John Malkovich), an android who looks exactly like his scientist-creator (also Malkovich) and turns out to possess far more human emotions than his maker. Skewering sexual contretemps and clichés for maximum laughs, "Making Mr. Right" targets the difficulty of finding and keeping a good man, so the sweet, sexy android -- a warmer, more human version of Gigolo Joe from "A.I." -- looks like Everywoman's fantasy of a boy toy. Built to spend long years in deep space sans loneliness, Ulysses unfortunately short-circuits into passionate love for Frankie. In a screwball switcheroo, the scientist who's "not very good with people" rides the rocket, while Ulysses hooks up with his lady love. "Nobody's perfect," the android lover quips, echoing the last hilarious words in "Some Like It Hot," as two gender-mismatched lovers (Jack Lemmon and Joe E. Brown) sail off into the sunset.

8. "Android" (1982)
Manning a deep-space lab, a prototypical nerd grooves on rock 'n' roll while fashioning a doll-sized metallic woman for her male counterpart to embrace, and checking out a sex-instruction program. Comes as no surprise that Max is less than human: smooth-skinned, helmeted with perfect hair, this skinny fellow's a tad edgy in his own skin, though he telegraphs very human horniness. Full of allusions to classic movies, "Android" mines major hilarity and horror out of the contrast between human savagery and Max's sweet dreams of getting to Earth -- off-limits following an awful outbreak of android murder and rape. Max's wide-eyed innocence can kill, but mostly it charms -- so that it's truly stomach-turning when the mad doctor (Klaus Kinski, a dead ringer for Rotwang of "Metropolis") pries open a panel in the back of our boy's skull to extract his "moral governor." Just-activated Cassandra saves the day, and she and Max head for Earth, his android ubermadchen hinting ominously of things to come: "We're not meant to be governed by the whims of men."

7. "RoboCop" (1987)
This rip-roaring actioner never wallows in the horror of reformatting a shot-up cop (Peter Weller) into an unstoppable cyborg -- "RoboCop" is all go! go! go! from start to finish.

His torso and limbs massively armored and weaponized, only the lower part of Murphy's sleekly helmeted face remains human -- but the way he twirls his huge sidearm like an old-time gunfighter is a dead giveaway. Even when his pre-death memories start flooding in, they're almost instantly converted into single-minded revenge that we wholeheartedly applaud, given the scarcely human slime that offed him. RoboCop's got a deliciously bent sense of humor: Programmed against attacking any employee of the corporation that built him, he snaps off a crisp "Thank you!" when the CEO cleverly fires the bad guy. A terrific ha-ha moment: The hulking ED-209 robot, hotly pursuing RoboCop, stops short at the top of a long flight of stairs, one "toe" of its huge tripartite foot delicately hazarding that first, fatal step.

6. "The Iron Giant" (1999)
A 100-foot-tall robot, with great round eyes, a steam-shovel jaw and a voracious appetite for scrap metal, lands smack-dab in the middle of the paranoid '50s, decade of Sputnik, the Red Scare and "duck and cover" cartoons. A bright, resourceful kid named Hogarth befriends the childlike monster and begins to "raise" him -- there's more than a hint here of Frankenstein's lightning-struck creation, as well as Spielberg's E.T. But it's a bad sign when the robot's eyes blaze angry-red at the sight of Hogarth's toy ray gun. And a deer killed by hunters gives the big lug his first painful lesson in mortality: "You die? I die?" "Giant" satirizes humankind's knee-jerk distrust of anything that's different, and celebrates the evolution of a machine of steel into Superman: The sweet-natured robot someone built to be a weapon of mass destruction makes a moral choice -- "I am not a gun!" -- and sacrifices himself to save Hogarth from nuclear annihilation.

5. "Battlestar Galactica" (TV series, 2004-2009)
In this universe-spanning sci-fi saga, androids called Cylons look like humankind's death knell. But these super-powerful immortals are mysteriously conflicted, perhaps driven by some larger imperative -- so that it's rarely certain whether they mean ultimate good or ill. And the fates of the human creators and their android offspring are intertwined: the birth of a baby to a Cylon mother and human father looms large -- and the recent news that two Cylons have a child coming signals that some kind of weird evolution is afoot, especially since the androids have lost the ability to endlessly resurrect. Most striking among the Cylon gynoids is Six (Tricia Helfer), usually blond, always graced with strikingly sculpted face and flawless body. Responsible for the destruction of humanity's home world, guardian spirit, shape-shifting lover of Galactica's second-in-command, star of a strange quasi-religious vision shared by human and Cylon alike, she's angel and succubus many times over.

4. "Alien" Trilogy (1979, 1986, 1992)
In "Alien," it's idiosyncratic, multihued human flesh that opposes the nothingness of deep space and the awful Otherness of the alien, a fanged, hooded, dragon-tailed shape-shifter with acid in its veins. Over and over, the striking clarity of Sigourney Weaver's features, the elegance and strength of her long-limbed warrior's body, defy the demonic perfection of the monster's inhuman physiology. Science Officer Ash (Ian Holm), a baby-faced android that bleeds white goo, worships the alien's purity, "unclouded by conscience, remorse, delusions of morality," characteristics the synthetic man clearly shares. The android in "Aliens" (Lance Henriksen) has the face of a medieval saint, starkly sculpted and somehow childlike, a faithful imitation of Ripley's humanity; aptly named, Bishop finds martyrdom, as he saves human mother and child. Only in "Alien 3" is Ripley's flesh breached by the alien, who impregnates her like some unholy ghost. When Bishop turns up, he looks like salvation to Ripley. But this Bishop, a human android-maker, parrots Ash: "Think of all we could learn from it ... you must let me have it!" Ripley chooses death, falling backward into a sea of fire.

3. "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence" (2001)
Drawing on "Wizard of Oz" and "Pinocchio," for starters, this darkly ferocious fairy tale follows the Dickensian pilgrimage of an android child hardwired to love without end. Watching David (Haley Joel Osment) imprint on his inconstant mommy, his generic android face instantaneously animated by genuine feelings, you're heart-struck by the terrible innocence and vulnerability the "real" woman has triggered for her emotional pleasure. Paradoxically, it's the artificial boy, not "superior" flesh-and-blood types, who loves most faithfully -- and a couple of thousand years later, organic, feeling humans exist only in David's long-lived Mecha memory. Emulating the most fundamental of religious impulses, David aches to be unique and loved, so he dreams up a Madonna who will make him so. Imagine that abandoned child worshipping his Blue Fairy for 2,000 years, deep in the frozen sea that covers Coney Island. We're talking love that passes (human) understanding.

2. "Blade Runner" (1982)
Here's a way to head off androids' evolving human emotions: Build in a fail-safe device that limits their lifespan to four years. (At least God gives us 70 or 80.) The fundamental riddle of "Blade Runner" is how to distinguish between real and fake humans -- especially when an android like the gorgeous Rachael (Sean Young) possesses a full set of memories and believes herself to be a natural woman. Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) and his replicant tribe mostly treat people like expendable toys, but these superbly crafted creatures have the capacity to grieve for the wasteful demise of their own kind. Watch how tenderly Batty leans to kiss clown-faced Pris (Daryl Hannah), terminated by Deckard (Harrison Ford). Unable to win longer life from his corporate maker, this alien angel utters his own eloquent epitaph: "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe ... and all those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain ... time to die."

1. "Metropolis" (1927)
In Fritz Lang's dystopian masterpiece, a sweet-faced Madonna preaches peace to zombiefied workers, oppressed by an elite class. To head off revolution, mad scientist Rotwang animates a mechanical woman, clothing her austerely beautiful metal body in saintly Maria's human flesh. Her face twisted by dark delight, the false Maria writhes erotically on a nightclub stage, her gyrating loins and perfect breasts literally dehumanizing the mesmerized audience. Rousing the underclass to destructive fury, the cyborg insinuates her body, snakelike, into their midst, spewing anarchist venom. A force that feeds on the worst in humanity, she's as heartless as electricity -- and the outraged mob burns the fembot at the stake, as though she were a witch.