The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor basically largely rips off the previous installments, especially the second one, and even though it was released in 2008, it doesn't exactly offer great visual effects (though thankfully, they're better than in the second one). While I've liked Maria Bello since Coyote Ugly, I missed the excellent Rachel Weisz. Brendan Fraser was still quite fit, but still bland acting-wise, as was Luke Ford as his son. Jet Li wasn't bad, John Hannah was passable (the interaction with the cow was funny), but it was Michelle Yeoh who appealed to me the most out of the whole cast. That said, the presence of the yetis, the family filler, the stilted action, and the stilted script inexorably bring the film down to the waters of mediocrity. (28/02/2021)

Jet Li has risen from the dead and decided to take over the world. Fortunately, Rick O'Connell and his family are here to stop him. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is hampered by poorly shot action sequences, and while there is always something going on screen, you rarely come across a genuinely entertaining moment in the barrage of mediocre visual effects and toe-curling dialogue. This wannabe adventure film that masquerades as ideal family entertainment is actually a prime example of wasted potential. (29/07/2008)

Yuck. I love The Mummy, and The Mummy Returns is a great sequel. But this? Rob Cohen is not Stephen Sommers. Maria Bello is not Rachel Weisz. Jet Li is not Arnold Vosloo. Neither Brendan Fraser nor John Hannah do much in favor of the third Mummy. I liked a few, really only a few, scenes (the opening one, the yetis and part of the final "battle") but overall I was very disappointed. Thanks at least for the likeable duo of Michelle Yeoh and Isabella Leong. Thanks to Cohen, all the playfulness has gone out of The Mummy, leaving an uninspired 112-minute-long mess, which I hope has been so overused that no one will make a fourth film. Only Sommers, but I don't believe that.__P.S. Edelman's good music is a shame to waste on this one. (29/08/2009)

Unnecessarily long introduction, where the legend is revealed, around which it will revolve, is just a plagiarism of the first part and quite sufficiently shows how the rest of the movie will proceed. Boring and unnecessarily long. The film is visually quite interesting at times, but what's the point when the story is really not worth anything? This is not a nice return to old familiar characters. Furthermore, I really missed Rachel Weisz here. I mean, no offense to Maria Bello, but Rachel is my favorite. Well, simply an incredible copycat of previous parts, only now it's Asian... (01/04/2014)

I really wasn’t asking too much from “I’ve even got a long way to go to become a routineer". All I wanted was a disposable harmless summer nonsense movie. But Cohen couldn’t even manage that. Instead, through his approach of “sort of humor, sort of screenplay, sort of blockbuster" he spreads an epidemic. The signs start to show somewhere around the tenth minute. First just in a few individuals. Then it spread quickly to the rest of the audience. Not even kids are immune. The first sign is massive yawning, the second nodding, the third is sleeping on the escalator when leaving the movie theater and the fourth is a disservice to Hollywood. After this, nobody can be surprised that so many people are allergic to it. I believe that if they organized a mass simultaneous projection of this movie around the planet, it would get into the Guinness Book of Records. For the largest number of people sleeping at one moment. There’s only one cure for this. Indy treatment. (03/08/2008)