#661: The Mummy Returns
Some franchises should stay wrapped
Initial release: May 4, 2001
Director: Stephen Sommers
I love 90s-to-early-00s adventure movies. There’s a bunch of really good ones out there, like Pirates of the Caribbean or The Count of Monte Carlo, and there’s a bunch of bad ones that are still fun to watch, like, oh I dunno, The Patriot? While Stephen Sommers’ 1999 reboot of Universal Pictures’ classic Mummy franchise is a solid, thoughtful, yet unabashedly fun flick, its sequel — creatively titled The Mummy Returns — is… more on the so-bad-it’s-good end of things.
Let’s get you up to speed. It’s been seven years since Rick the adventurer and Evelyn the archaeologist kicked an evil ancient Egyptian magician’s ass. They’ve since got married and had a kid named Alex, who is now eight (or so he claims, I don’t know how the math works.) They’re still exploring dusty Egyptian tombs, but when they return to London, Evelyn is kidnapped by cultists attempting to resurrect Imhotep as a means of defeating an ancient evil. Said ancient evil is even older than Imhotep, a warrior known as the Scorpion King who pledges his soul to Anubis in exchange for power. (Though played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, he’s borderline a non-character in this; it’s only in the Scorpion King movies that he gets a backstory or even a name.) Evelyn is rescued before she’s sacrificed, but Imhotep is resurrected anyway, so it’s a question as to why they even needed her in the first place. There’s a chase scene with some mummies running through the streets of London and Alex is kidnapped, mostly because he has a fancy bracelet that shows the way to the Scorpion King’s tomb. So Rick, Evelyn and company all chase the cult around the Middle East before finally catching up to them at the King’s hidden pyramid, Evelyn dies and is resurrected, there’s a horrible CGI scorpion-Rock monster, et cetera et cetera.
While The Mummy Returns is ultimately a fun ride, a ride is all it is. Alex is precociously funny, deliberately annoying the living shit out of the cultist assigned to watch him, but none of these characters, not even Rick and Evelyn, are much more than cardboard cutouts in the service of a linear sequence of special effects with a touch of Final Fantasy goofiness with a gas-powered dirigible. Despite being Dwayne Johnson’s acting debut, it gives him almost nothing to work with, the 3rd-millennium-BC setting barely touched on and even his monstrous scorpion form is entirely CGI. Even the practical effects are less than convincing at times — ancient stone columns, clearly made out of foam, have visible seams from the mold they were cut from.
I’ve seen all five Scorpion King movies, and The Mummy Returns is a lot like them: never unwatchable, but rarely smart. It’s unfortunate because the adventure genre is a long and storied one, and — in spite of the obvious ethical questions they pose — I’m a big fan of the adventure-archeology genre, probably going back to when I was big into Tomb Raider in the late 1990s. I’ve said before that sequels are great: they let you build on what you started with, to make something even better. But that’s the thing that’s most frustrating about Returns; the original film was a perfect example of how to dust off a long-moribund franchise and revive it for a new generation (1998’s The Mask of Zorro is another one) and they very well could have kept that energy going for the sequel. But the sequel is lazy at best — Imhotep being the main villain again is straight up some “somehow Palpatine returned” shit, and in my opinion totally unnecessary. The Mummy Returns does a big disservice to the 1999 film; the 1999 film managed to be fun, funny and yet respected the audience, but this sequel is, quite frankly, little more than a lightshow for an audience that’s not expected to do more than gawp and eat popcorn.
I guess at the end of the day I don’t hate The Mummy Returns, wagonload of bad CGI, plot holes and Diablo 2-style racist depictions of undead pygmies notwithstanding; but Mummy 1999 is just so much a better film on every level that I have to wonder if it needed a sequel at all.
