superficial fun for the undemanding

Rating: Null/10 (25 May 2001)

once again here is a movie that is insanely successful without really deserving it (in my humble opinion, that is). sure, it has lots of effects (some great, some not so hot), plenty of action and some likable characters, but overall it´s all facade and no substance. director stephen sommers obviously tried to surpass the first movie´s "wow-factor", but unfortunately chose to sacrifice every little bit of story, atmosphere and character development the original had in the process. what little story there is can be summed up in two sentences and is nothing but a lame excuse for heaping CGI effect upon CGI effect and elaborate setpiece upon elaborate setpiece, effectively reducing the movie to a showcase for Industrial Light & Magic. all of the characters are stereotypical cardboard cut-outs, which in a way is just as well, as viewers are thrown into the thick of the action from the get-go, leaving anybody who hasn´t seen the original to his own devices in figuring out who´s who and how the characters are related to each other.
*POSSIBLE SPOILERS COMING UP*
what´s worse is that both vosloo as the mummy and Dwayne "Rock" Johnson as the much-hyped scorpion king are never given anything to do. the former has about 6 scenes and hardly any dialogue in the whole movie while the latter pops up for two minutes without a line of dialogue at the very beginning, only to return as a badly made and decidedly anticlimactic CGI effect at the very end. judging from "the mummy returns" it´s hard to believe that a scorpion king spin-off movie is seriously being developed on the supposed strength of the character. the mind boggles... the actors´ performances, by the way, oscillate between adequate (Fraser, Weisz, Fehr) and dreadful (notably Velasquez). Fraser in particular looks like he had a blast shooting the movie and is eminently likable throughout, which somehow only made me wish he´d turn to making better movies again, while Vosloo - unsurprisingly - looks downright bored at times. as if all of this wasn´t enough, whole characters and action scenes are blatantly ripped off either from the first movie (compare the canyon chase to the sandstorm chase in the original) or other films (e.g. the pilot character, who is a straight lift from Mad Max 2).
so what´s the overall verdict? well, i really wanted to like this movie, and i did, in a way, although for all the wrong reasons. it´s entertaining on a very superficial, purely audio-visual level but left me completely uninvolved throughout. since the characters are so one-dimensional and underused, I never really cared for what would happen to them, and the endless barrage of effects sommers throws at the viewer gets more and more tiring as the movie goes on, making the whole affair seem strangely hollow. "the mummy returns" is all appearance and no soul. only for the undemanding...