“I’ve seen enough mummies to last a lifetime!” gasps John Hannah’s whiny coward midway through this belated attempt to bring the Mummy franchise back from the dead. To be honest we’d pretty much reached that point already by the time The Mummy Returns stumbled to a halt seven years ago. Rob Cohen’s Asia-friendly follow-up tries to give a new slant to proceedings by flying Brendan Fraser’s returning hero Rick O’Connell and his wife Evelyn (Maria Bello, stepping in for an indisposed Rachel Weisz) over to post-war China for some Great Wall escapades with Jet Li’s evil Dragon Emperor and his resurrected army of Terracotta warriors. No amount of Oriental fixtures, alas, can stop this being reheated Indy, right down to the annoying Mini-Me sidekick (Luke Ford as Fraser’s grown-up son Alex) who accompanies him on his travels.
From the booby-trapped temple where Li’s cursed tyrant is first discovered to the frantic car chase through period Shanghai, it looks as if writers Alfred Gough and Miles Millar have been raiding Dr Jones’ back catalogue as well. Even George Lucas, though, would balk at having his protagonist saved by CGI Yetis or deriving ‘comedy’ from a vomiting yak. For all Cohen’s professed respect for Chinese culture, meanwhile, this is very much the Far East for dummies – a bit of martial arts, a reference to feng shui and a Shangri-La that’s as tacky as Disneyland.
Fraser swaggers through the resulting hodgepodge with the same knowing smirk he wore in Journey To The Center Of The Earth 3-D. He’s no doubt aware that nothing he does could possibly suck as much as Bello’s mealy-mouthed English accent or a stop-start story that renders him a mere spectator in the climactic battle between Li’s clay soldiers and a Ray Harryhausen-style legion of reanimated skeletons. Li, meanwhile, is barely present, only coming alive in a sword duel with Michelle Yeoh’s 2,000-year-old sorceress. Would that the film did the same.
Verdict: Dumb, inept and more than a little dull, this lacklustre blockbuster suggests it's time to put The Mummy back in its sarcophagus. If The Scorpion King's anything to go by, though, those bloody Yetis will probably get their own spin-off.
