Don't waste your money; wait for the video game

Rating: 2/10 (18 November 2001)

I found the first "Mummy" film to be rather a guilty pleasure. We were introduced to some fun and interesting characters, there was some snappy dialogue, and the effects were kind of nifty. It wasn't a great film, by a long stretch, and it certainly didn't give Brendan Fraser an opportunity to flash his considerable acting chops, but it was good summer fun.
How disappointing to discover the sequel to be no pleasure at all, guilty or otherwise. The characters were cardboard cut-outs -- writer/director Sommers doesn't even bother to reintroduce us to any of them, much less develop them in any way at all, as if he didn't expect us to care about them; the dialogue makes "wooden" seem like an accolade; and the effects were so obviously computer-generated that they just looked cheesy. The point, I would think, of CGI is that the eye is fooled into believing that there is a desert plain filled with warriors, not into recognizing that there are about 100 actors in the foreground, and a teeming mass of pixels behind them.
Worse, the money saved on box-top visuals wasn't spent on screenwriters or editors. The scenes are jump-cut out of all comprehension, and the dialogue seems to serve only for something to put on the soundtrack to break the stretches of John Williams-knockoffs. The director doesn't bother to pace the action, to build up from valleys into heights, most likely because he fears that slowing down at all would tip off the audience that there is no there there. Rarely does the viewer find any cause or effect between the characters' words and actions. When the hero's son is captured, the mother briefly grieves and the father sets his jaw, but one senses they do this because that's what parents are supposed to do, not because they are feeling the potential loss of their only child
Until I saw The Mummy Returns, I believed the worst film I had ever seen was George Clooney's zombie-state-inducing "Batman and Robin." I thought I would never see its like in terms of plot-deprivation, dialogic inanity, and gratuitous special effects. Congratulations, Stephen Sommers: not only did you make Mr. Freeze look like high art, you managed to make a movie less exciting than the video game that grew out of it.