Maintains the fun of its predecessor at the expense of any dignity the franchise had left.

Rating: 2/10 (26 December 2004)

Early in "The Mummy Returns," sequel to Universal's 1999 blockbuster remake "The Mummy," charming American swashbuckler Rick O'Connell (Brendan Fraser) fights a cadre of decomposed Egyptian corpses on the back of a London double-decker. Also on the bus is Rick's wife/scholar Evelyn (Rachel Weisz), to whom he laments, "This is bad!" "We've had bad before," Evelyn replies. Rick: "This is worse!" Indeed! As is the whole of "The Mummy Returns," a film so ludicrously over the top and blindly made that even after Warner Brothers' dismal "Wild Wild West" featuring jets retrofitted to a flying bicycle, this film put the jets on a flying boat.
Explaining the plot of "The Mummy Returns" in detail is about as necessary as cooking directions on Pop-Tarts: Ten-or-so years after the events in "The Mummy," Rick and Evelyn must search the globe for their son Alex (Freddie Boath) who, after trying on a bracelet that was actually an ancient artifact belonging to a Babylonian-era warlord named The Scorpion King (The Rock), becomes a human map to a mythical oasis where The King awaits an opponent who, if victorious, will take control of his armies and have the power to rule the world. The kidnapper was none other than Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo), the eponymous ghoul and former high priest thwarted by O'Connell in the first film, now resurrected by the voluptuous Meela Nais (Patricia Valasquez), reincarnation of Anck Su Namun, the ancient beauty whom Imhotep shared a fatal affair with thousands of years ago. The evil pair plan to find the oasis and defeat The Scorpion King, and thus, like a biblical Bonnie and Clyde, set the whole gory story into motion.
And those are just the broad strokes! Along the way we encounter the usual hoards of faceless, black-cloaked baddies with guns, the not-so-usual undead soldiers, and the flat-out weird and nasty little pygmy-mummies--everything coated with the oh-so-easy-to-swallow zombie in-jokes of ghouls bobbling their own decapitated heads.
All that said, "The Mummy Returns" maintains all the fun of its predecessor (if only at the expense of any dignity the franchise had left.) This is a movie that knows it's bad (and boy is it bad!), that knows it's the ultimate product of the Hollywood machine--and is damn proud of it! It's undeniably great to see O'Connell leap and tumble his way out of ridiculously overwhelming odds--literally one wrong step from being horribly gored in front of his child. At the film's climax, O'Connell is engaged in a battle against the new and CGI improved Scorpion King (complete with giant scorpion legs and torso). As I watched Brendan Fraser (and/or his stuntman) dodge the unstoppable claws of the rendered-Rock's intimidating mandible, it occurred to me that I hadn't seen such wickedly intense choreography of actor and CGI since Jeff Goldblum and Julianne Moore tangoed beautifully with a pair of hungry velociraptors in "The Lost World: Jurassic Park" (another enjoyable franchise-destroyer). For "The Mummy Returns," VFX supervisor John Andrew Burton Jr. and a very extended team brought this sequence to life.
Fraser has always plunged headfirst into roles that even the most work-starved actor might shy away from ("Encino Man," "Looney Toons: Back In Action," "Monkeybone"), and does so with such enthusiasm that we never feel embarrassed for him. Here he embraces Rick O'Connell in all his two-dimensionality where others might abandon the role, and the character survives because of him.
Joining Rick and Evelyn are Evelyn's unscrupulous-yet-lovable bro Jonathan (John Hannah) and the melodramatic guru-warrior Ardeth Bey (that dude with all the Arabic writing on his cheeks, played by Oded Fehr), who also serves as the film's interim historian, giving us any and all back story needed without all the bother of exposition or creative storytelling. An enjoyable chemistry and timing has developed between these actors in just two films. There truly is a sense of camaraderie; We find it quite easy, for example, to accept Jonathan's momentary turn of seriousness toward the end of the film after two acts of comedy because the other actors know just how to respond to him (Hannah is possibly the best Scottish actor alive, see "Sliding Doors").
Of course, the bulk of the film is lighthearted, and any melodrama is taken with a grain of salt--not least of all by screenwriter/director Sthephen Sommers, who plays up the group-fun-breeziness that worked so well with the first mummy movie; Upon seeing the forbidden bracelet on Alex's arm, Ardeth decrees grimly, "By putting on the bracelet, you have started a chain reaction that could bring about the next apocalypse." Fraser looks at Ardeth, "Hey, you, lighten up." I suppose that's Sommers' best and only defense against critics like Peter Travers of Rolling Stone who (justifiably) called his film "A p!ss poor mummy movie indeed that doesn't deliver a damn thing worth preserving."
"Hey, Peter, lighten up."