Horrible.

Rating: 2/10 (24 May 2009)

There is no excuse for this. This was, literally, the worst big-budget movie in 2001.
I won't disagree with the 'cartoony' feel of the thing. If that's the way you want to go with it - you want to take a classic horror movie and turn it into something horrific because it'll get the little kids to drag mommy and daddy in, then that's fine. You bought the rights, have at it. And it's even possible to enjoy someone raping cinema history as Sommers did here, I'm sure, if it's done well.
This wasn't.
I'll just give you two examples. Please bear in mind that these are merely examples, they are by no means 'the only two problems with the movie' but they are two of the biggest.
First of all Alex is left in Lock-Nah's care. Here is a gentleman who has survived in some of the harshest environments in the world, and in this movie we're to believe that he'll just grudgingly do whatever Alex tells him because he can't murder the kid. You have taken suspension of disbelief too far. As an audience member I wanted to pin his hand to a table with a knife and tell him that if he needed a drink to pee his pants and suck the moisture out of the fabric, because he's not going anywhere. But we're to believe that a man who lives in areas where people would sooner kill you just for thinking you're a thief than bother to call the authorities would just groan and do as he's told by this brat. No dice, Sommers, you moron.
Secondly (and this is just an even worse version of something that happened in the first one, actually) at the end, when verses need to be spoken to perform 'magic', huge conversations are carried on in the midst of it. "Magic magic magic . . . hey, how do I say this? Yeah, this right here! Are you sure? Oh, yeah, that's it! Alright, thanks! Hey, how're things going? Doing well? Awesome, awesome. Well, I'd better get on with saving the world from hordes of the undead! Yeah, I know, every summer, right?! Ha! Anyway . . . magic magic magic." By Sommers' logic, we should all be casting magic spells every day, because at some point, you're going to have uttered all the syllables in the right order. Just more poorly-thought-out crap that anyone with an IQ over 80 could spot the hole in with about 2 1/2 seconds of thought, but Sommers has so little respect for his audience that he just tosses it in there so that he can build tension.
In other words: Sommers wanted a visual spectacle to be delivered, and he did so. He wanted mummies in there, and there were. He wanted Brendan Frasier, and there is. He wanted Egyptian women trained in and fighting with Asian weapons (in ancient Egypt) and for some reason, there are. He wanted a "precocious" child (read: freaking insufferable little turd begging to be thrown from a plane, sans parachute) and he got one. What Sommers did not give a crap about was a coherent setting that's consistent with itself, much less the real world. Because Sommers clearly has the intelligence of a dung beetle, and expects you to as well.