Do not watch if you're older than 15

Rating: 1/10 (21 June 2005)

The first Stephen Sommers mummy-movie, released in 1999, already was a lousy and overly boisterous film that focused on the visual eye-candy rather than to re-tell the classic Imothep-tale properly. Still, it had its compelling moments and enough humor to put the whole production into perspective. Even the more experienced horror fan, who seeks atmosphere instead of excitement, could find a bit of joy in "The Mummy". This rapidly finished sequel, however, fully aims itself at (pre-) teen audiences who never in their lives saw a good movie and waste their days with playing video games! The script is a mess, revolving on the resurrection of Imothep (again) and the coming of a new Egyptian bad-boy, namely "The Scorpion King". Rick and Evelyn O'Connor (the heroes of the first) as well as Imothep intend to destroy "The Scorpion King", but for different purposes. The mean mummy wants to take of command of Scorpion's army and wipe out the world whereas the archaeologists-couple tries to prevent this. There's a giant amount of totally redundant sequences and it looks like they were only added to show good the makers are with computer-engineered special effects. Okay, we got it...tell a story instead! Every dead end or illogical aspect in the script is resolved with another attention-distracting visual trick and  after a while  it looks like the writers aren't even trying to be ingenious anymore. The acting is really bad with Fraser and Weisz both thinking about their paychecks instead of their lines and the introduction of cinema's most annoying child-actor in history: Freddie Boath. He's an 8-year-old brat who supposedly has more archaeologist-knowledge than an army of university professors. John Hannah also walks around the sets for no reason. He had a few funny one-liners and grimaces in the first film, but his part here is pretty much pointless. For some incomprehensible reason, this movie is pretty loved among IMDb-members (judging by the ratings and user comments) but I can't think of any positive (or even redeeming) comments in favor of it. I'm sorry